Got caught in a drenching shower yesterday during a march in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. T played her drum with some stalwart Batala musicians while I marched alongside with this painting of Breonna Taylor.
The photo was taken long after the march was over; we were about to get in the car and the painting was wet and about to collapse in my hands. My sour look is probably because of wet underwear from the thunderstorm.
The portrait didn’t quite come out the way I had intended (sometimes a picture has its own motive, much like a character in a story). In her photos online, her face is rounder, younger, less ambivalent, and a lot of the pictures people have drawn are more joyful. I saw something else in her eyes, and it lingered in every sketch I did. Eventually, despite every effort to make her look more like her selfies, I surrendered to the face that seemed to want to be in the portrait. Weird.
Writer George Hagen's Blog 