There is a specific kind of silence that comes when your heart stops beating.
I know it because I lived through it — or, more precisely, I died through it. In 2015, I went into open heart surgery and didn't come back the normal way. I flatlined. They brought me back. And when I opened my eyes on the other side of that table, something had shifted that I still don't have the language to fully explain.
What I have instead is paint.
The Canvas After the Table
People talk about near-death experiences like they're a moment — a flash, a tunnel, a light. Mine was more like a conversation. Not with words. With weight. A feeling that every image I'd ever stored in my body was now owed something. That they needed to get out. That keeping them inside would be its own kind of dying.
I grew up in the Bronx, raised on the visual grammar of the city. The graffiti that turned subway cars into moving exhibitions. The street murals that turned bodega walls into galleries. The energy of Keith Haring's dancing figures and Jean-Michel Basquiat's crown-wearing hieroglyphs — art that was always fighting for its right to exist. I absorbed all of it before I had a word for what I was absorbing.
But after the surgery, I wasn't just inspired. I was called. There's a difference. Inspiration says: wouldn't it be nice. A calling says: you don't have a choice.
What the Resurrection Does to a Brush
I became an open heart surgery artist in the truest sense — not because my subject matter is the heart, though often it is, but because everything I make now passes through what happened on that table. Every color decision is theological. Every composition is a testimony. When I choose to put gold against red, I'm not thinking about color theory. I'm thinking about what was taken and what was given back.
My style — Spiritual Neo-Pop Expressionism — didn't come from a school or a movement. It came from a moment of resurrection and from the streets that raised me. It's Warhol's boldness, Basquiat's rawness, Haring's joy, all filtered through a faith that isn't borrowed from anyone else's tradition. It's personal. It's specific. And it's permanent, because it came at a cost I'll never forget.
Why Testimony Makes Better Art
There's a question I get asked a lot: Why does your work feel different?
I think it's because most art is made from observation. Mine is made from resurrection. Observers report on what they see. Someone who has come back from death is reporting on what is real at a level that bypasses the surface.
The collectors who find my work tend to be people who have been through something — a loss, a illness, a season of breaking — and they recognize in the canvas what they couldn't say out loud about their own experience. The colors hit somewhere. The scale matters. A 1-of-1 original that came through testimony meets a collector who is carrying their own testimony, and something happens that a limited-edition print on a bedroom wall simply cannot replicate.
Each Canvas Is a Witness
Every painting I make is 1-of-1. Signed by my hand. It won't be reprinted, remixed, or diluted. That's not a marketing decision — it's a theological one. The testimony I put into a canvas is specific and singular, and so the object that holds it should be too.
If you've been looking for an open heart surgery artist whose work carries actual testimony — not the idea of testimony, but the weight of having crossed over and been sent back — I want you to see what I've made.
The brush came back with me. These canvases are proof.