The collection memoirs of Love and Hate, there's something that I've had in my spirit since I started my career seven years ago. My first muse, the thing that I paint the most of, is the American flag. Because the American flag represents who I am, it gives a specific dichotomy of an invitation that brings you in from an aspect of warmth and being comfortable. But there's so much of a darker content behind what goes behind those 50 stars in 13 strikes and those three colors of red, white and blue. The simplicity of it gives it an elegance, almost like a symphony that's playing throughout this dance of a ballerina that is paying the story. But then you have to look at what those things have been built upon. The love side is the freedoms of what we have within this country. You know, there's so many, I would say, liversations that we take for granted and opportunities. But the basis of those, if you go backwards into centuries and centuries, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, of what those things were portrayed and then went into those things from slavery to the conquering of this land from the indigenous people, which we call Indians. They were the originators. And what people have to understand is that in order to take over something, there is going to be lies told, there's going to be deceit and everything is not going to be beautiful. So that's where the love and the hate side both come. You know, these pieces, they will be provoking because they will provoke a specific emotion that you try to run and hide from. It will keep you in a space to where you'll want to stay in that space, but then at some moment in time, once you reach that that that pungent part of the content, it's going to make you want to run. But still that love side of what it represents is going to make you want to stay in that pocket. From a specific standpoint, there's a piece titled The One's We Forget About. And it's about a young child who's in the first grade and they write a journal entry. The journal entry is so heavy and just emotional, but the child can barely spell. But it's titled The One's That We Forget About because we forget about that aspect of the world whenever these things of content are being displayed to us, whether it be through media or newsletter or social media, but everything is so in our face. To be specific, the child is writing about seeing their father shot by a police officer over the weekend. And they don't even know if he's dead or alive, but at the end of the journal entry, the child says, I don't want to be shot and die like him. But that was also the child's hero. And the irony too, that is his teacher who he's writing this to in her classroom, her husband was the police officer that she has fun. So you know, it's almost like you want to embrace the child, but then also too you feel for the child and you want to shed a tear for the child and then you become angry at the actual dialect and the motion that has taken place to affect this child, to where they understand the content of what's going on in the world and what happened, but from a simpler standpoint, they can barely spell. So it's like a contradiction which represents the layout of American history and the journal entry is actually, it looks like it's painted on a piece of paper, but it's actually painted on an American flag. And that, you know, that teeters on both sides, it gives you all of those emotions from the love side to the hate side, you know, to the compassion side. And then I have another piece titled, Goliath, and it's just a giant flag made out of paper and it has stitching in it and all these different colors. It's nine feet by four feet because as we know Goliath in the Bible, we forget about him. We only really focus on the triumph of David, the Goliath filled up the presence of that actual moment because it was almost unbearable to where he cannot be defeated. And that's what the premise goes into of this piece because it's such a large piece, it's such a large figure of what we look at within that space. But in certain aspects, you know, within American content, we failed as a nation to actually just be righteous and to give the truth of what this country has been built upon. So, you know, I look at this collection and it was of love and hate as a therapy session, as a history lesson. And I want those two things to be able to ride upon each other's backs to play off of one another, almost like, you know, it's two people dancing of ballet within this symphony that's playing all these different chaotic, yet melodic sounds that all play into what we call America.