Growing up bombarded with pop culture images as well as street culture, my work is the colorful mixture of all the positive and negative life lessons I’ve experienced growing up in New York City.
I take pop culture imagery such as 80s cartoons, black and white movies, television shows, iconic characters , classic photos and transform them using paint as my medium into a dream world, reflecting the vast array of emotions one can undergo living in the streets. From lows to the highs, erasing the boundaries between the Hero and the Villain, dark and light, an innocent cartoon character and a murderer monster, my paintings fuse life contradictions into a visual dialogue where two worlds that typically cannot co-exist intermingle.
Some may consider the topics uncomfortable especially since a large portion of my work focuses on images of children with guns. This imagery represents the delinquency and the mental suicide (genocide) of the late 80’s early 90’s that my generation experienced in New York City and all over the world.
My foundation is graffiti. Renaissance masters and contemporary works also heavily influence me. I’ve experimented with mix media but I find myself lured to oil paint. Every time I pick up a brush it’s a learning experience, internal and external. Painting is only part of my process, the other part is research and sampling images like a Hip Hop producer samples records, digging deep literally and figuratively. It’s hard to explain piecing the pieces together, because I work through something bigger then oneself.
I describe my work as “Eye – Concept.” It’s the style and processes I use to I translate my work. I came up with this idea in a song I wrote two years ago. The song talks about different icons from cartoon to television and movie personas interacting through crime.
What drives me to create is that I must relay, document, learn, absorb, capture and share with the world, a deep love for the present.
In a nutshell, my work is an exorcism of self while soul searching in the middle of a war, where my battlefield is a canvas for the war waged within.
- JOSAMA
