These works come from the earliest chapters of my life as an artist, created mostly during my teenage years. At around eleven, I told my father that he could choose between music and art, but I was going to be sent to classes for one of them. He chose art. My mother and grandmother helped make it possible, and what began as childhood curiosity slowly became something much more personal.
The framed Big Five series was commissioned by my father and became an opportunity for me to explore soft pastel, a medium I loved at the time. But perhaps the most meaningful piece in the collection is the three-panel African sunset I painted for him at seventeen. It was my first experience building and stretching my own canvases, and one of the first moments I began to see myself not just as someone who enjoyed making art, but as an artist.
These works are imperfect, youthful and sometimes naive, and that is exactly why I have kept them. They are evidence of where I began.