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This piece is straight from the remnants of my childhood. Growing up in Chicago my mother always had a subscription to Jet & Ebony magazines. I hav vivid memories of those magazines being my view into what modern black life was. It showed the beauty of black in a way that I didn’t see on the covers of the magazines at the grocery store check out counters. That iconography often shows up in my most recent work. The main subject of the piece serves as hyper realistic version of what that beauty translated to me when I was just a young boy reading comic books and watching Saturday morning cartoons. All and all it’s a mashup of my cumulative discovery of the beauty of the world around me…and ultimately myself.