Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
This is from a poem written by John Keats about a particularly inspiring Grecian urn, and in turn these words have inspired me to create for decades.
As a young lad growing up in suburban Clarksville, Tennessee (just north of Nashville), my vivid imagination was a refuge from a tumultuous home and the loneliness of social isolation. I was an only child to my father, and being a black kid in an almost totally white district was not ideal for my social status.
Thankfully, I was an avid reader and video-gamer. Rich and lovely characters, real and imagined, kept me good company when I was lonely. As the universe of my imagination expanded- rich with demigods and monsters, magic and absurdism, heroism and romance- I wanted nothing more to immerse myself in that world. I wanted to shake hands and dance with the characters of my dreams. Naturally, as soon as I developed enough writing skill to cobble a few paragraphs together I began writing stories. And as soon as I was able to put enough shapes together to vaguely resemble a person, I was illustrating those stories.
Now, just over a couple decades later, I am still pursuing that drive to bring the vivid stories and worlds that I dream up to life on canvas. My skill has improved, of course, but the heart of what I do remains the same.
When I was downtrodden and incessantly lonely, stories sustained me. Stories gave me hope. Stories connected me to the world and its people when nothing else could. So storytelling, naturally, became and remains my true love. All of my passions- writing, illustration, music, etc.- they are all a means of telling stories. Now it’s my greatest goal to create stories that inspire and connect others in the way that I was, and continue to be.