Drawing Guest Speaker

I felt that this guest speaker had a very interesting approach to his artwork.  His art bridged all different types of media while keeping the strong theme of African American art throughout them.  His work in video took scenes from movies like Foxy Brown and distorted them using a mirror filter on them.  This created abstract images while keeping the general theme presented in the clip intact.  The emotion for the Foxy Brown piece was fear.  This was supposed to symbolize the fear after the 9/11 attacks in America.  His paintings used digital photography in an interesting way also.  He took images of famous African American figures and created their silhouettes in bright yellows, reds, oranges, and purples.  These colors help to relay the concept of African culture.  Another series of paintings he did had printed out black and white images of Famous black figures with the same yellows reds oranges and purples, painted lines leading to the figure.    This created an interesting composition because for the most part the figures were fairly small compared to the brightly colored lines, creating an interesting juxtaposition.  Also the fact that the rest of the canvas was a stark white created a jolting and sterile feeling surrounding the figure and the lines.  His third series of paintings took out the colorful lines and had a much more ridged and docile feeling to them.  They usually were comprised of a white canvas with a single black line only turning at 90 degree angles.  Then somewhere in the painting there would be a black and white print of some historic African American moment.  I recall one that had a picture of a Black Panther meeting.  I personally felt that these were the most developed of all his paintings.  The images were very carefully placed on the canvas.  The pictures were in theme with the line in that they were about the same thickness as the line and would match up with an angle of the line somehow.  However, the line as an entire mass was considerably larger than the picture.  This created an unusual dialogue between the two subjects.  There was one massive figure that was simple and monotone, and then a much smaller figure that had a wide range of black whites and grays and was very detailed.