Expectations of Beauty (2015)

When my mentor saw what I could already do with the buckets of colored pencils in his room, he handed me a brush and my first tube of oil paint. This piece was my introduction to real paint, and I consider it the true beginning of my body of work. Painted when I was 15 on a scholarship at the Episcopal Academy, it captures my early processing of the shift from navigating colorism to confronting racism, while being the first portrait that I used professional quality material to make.