Painting Stillness: Reimagining the Black Feminine in Classical Art
Summer 2025 feels like stillness and heat—a slow burn, both outside and within. It’s also the season I finally faced something I’ve been avoiding for a long time: painting on a large canvas.

This is my first big piece. And to be completely honest, I’ve been afraid of working at this scale. I’ve never felt like I had the patience to trust the process. Creating something on a larger surface requires a different kind of commitment—a surrender to imperfection and the unknown. It’s not finished yet, but I’ve decided to share it anyway. Even as a work in progress, it feels important to put it out into the world. To risk being seen. To risk critique. To risk being laughed at for not getting it “right.”

The piece is inspired by Volodia Popov’s Madone à l’éventail—a painting I stumbled across and couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s whimsical, classic, and quietly mystical. It moved me. But like much of the traditional art world, it also reminded me of what’s missing.

As a Black woman artist with no formal training in art history, I often find myself navigating spaces and styles where people who look like me are simply… absent. I’m drawn to symbolism, tradition, the romanticism of classical art. But what happens when you fall in love with an aesthetic that never made room for your existence?

That’s my challenge—and my mission. To imagine something new. To reframe, reclaim, and reimagine the Black feminine within the language of classical art. To paint myself, and women like me, into the stories and styles we were once excluded from.

This canvas, in all its unfinished rawness, is a declaration: I am here. We are here. And our beauty, mystery, and stillness belong in every era, every gallery, every frame.