This painting was born from a moment of recognition. I stood before Jenny Baptiste’s photography exhibition and felt something shift. Her lens had captured the London music scene of the nineties and early two-thousands with such clarity and care. It was nostalgic and grounding. A swell of pride rose in me. Thank goodness someone had documented that time. The youth, the emergence, the unapologetic declaration that we are here and we are loving the life we live.

London is a city that rarely pauses. It hums with urgency and expectation. Not in the hustle way of New York where people are visibly building something. London holds a quieter dread. A feeling that I am not doing enough and that I must do more. But I do not know what the more is. So I keep moving. That state robs the beauty of the present. It steals the softness of stopping and smelling the roses.

This painting is my attempt to reclaim that softness. To honour the moment. To say yes, I see you. I see the fists clenched not in anger but in power. I see the adornments, the gold rings, the red fabric, the hair flowing like memory. I see the pride and the pain and the joy of being alive in a city that does not always make space for it.

Art in London does not often respect urban life and poverty. There is no glamorisation or romanticisation of low income and working class experience. But Jenny’s photographs reminded me that grime music was born from this very thing. The cradle of art starts in the cracks in the pavement.

This piece is a reminder to stay true. To resist the lure of the limelight and the validation of the status quo. To remember that beauty lives in the margins and that truth does not need permission to shine