“Untitled”
42″ x 30″
Oil/Canvas
Price: $ 2,500.00

Like many artists, I teach to make a living. Though I have taught art, I prefer to teach English as a Second Language part-time (through the City Colleges of Chicago) while doing art full time.

Language teaching has informed my artwork. For years, influenced by the contact with many worlds provided by my students, my thoughts have circled around the notion of culture and custom, and have come to the understanding that custom and tradition provide patterns necessary for the maintenance of social behavior and art, but that they also have an evil side: they justify cruelties and unspeakable acts and ideologies that create structure by exclusion and oppression. In my classes I often see the glorious side of human nature at its most tolerant, kind and curious, but I hear the stories of the dark side.

The images I use in pictures exemplify the views of the world I have access to. And probably I am attracted to this most traditional form of art (picture-making with human and animal images) because of its broad accessibility. It’s a form most people are familiar with; that is an advantage for me, because I want to convey everything as directly as possible, and have almost no interest in using my picture to comment on the convention of picture-making.