Artist statement

Understand the body first, because everything else follows from it. Mine was drilled to hit and trained to render in the same breath. Praised on the field, doubted in the studio. I stopped apologizing for carrying both a long time ago. I paint the human figure the way the old masters taught me to, with weight, with a light that argues for somebody's dignity. Then I hand that figure to hip hop, which never once asked permission before it sampled an inheritance into something new. Reverence and refusal, at the same time, in the same hand. That's the whole of my method.

Text is not decoration in this work. It's testimony. A name scrawled in marker. A line of my own poetry pressed into raw canvas. A date that means nothing to a stranger and everything to the people who lived it. That's how the painting talks back, in its own tongue, on its own terms. I don't finish a canvas top to bottom just to prove I can. A story doesn't always close its own wound before you're asked to tell it, and I refuse to let a piece lie about that. It stays exactly as true as it needs to be. No more polished than the truth allows.

I come from people who made something out of near nothing more times than should have ever been asked of them, and I paint the way they survived. Sampling. Layering. Holding the tenderness and the danger in the same frame, because that's how the men I love actually show up in a room. Every canvas is a remix. A baroque figure dressed in the wrong century on purpose. A name from the corner set next to a god from the old country. A boy's face lit the way a king's used to be. I'm not asking to belong to all of it. I already do.

Each one teach one. That's the whole practice, if it has to fit in one line.

T. Wilkes