Sinnea+Douglas

JaZz The CITY

Artist Statement: For the first quarter I wanted to focus on the city. There were so many aspects of city life to choose from so I decided to do all them throughout the year. For this quarter I really wanted to do something with the Harlem Renaissance era and jazz. New York, the late Miles Davis and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing were some of my biggest inspirations. I didn't really know what I wanted to draw so I started off with people talking to one another out of apartment buildings. By the end of this year I hope to have a portfolio of Jazz paintings and city landscapes.

Another thing that inspired me is poetry. I am a performance poet and some of my poems are reflected in my art. Here’s an example:

The City Big Crowded Noisy Shining light on what nature cannot Fire escapes, Brownstones and tiny overpriced studio apartments lay among you Taxi’s and buses fill your narrow streets Never stopping to feel your greatness
 * Ode to the City **

You smell of cheese-steaks burning tar and gas fumes

Dirty air and grey people drown out your voice Giving you no choice to be heard

But you heart beats to the sound of horns and high heels clicking on the streets

Streetlights whisper-coded languages letting us know when it’s safe to cross The boundaries of the city.

City life The good life The fast life The only life

Artist Statement: For this quarter I choose to stick with Jazz Art. I traced pictures of a Jazz Art made by Christopher Dean Myers. I plan to finish the pictures next quarter by either painting them on a canvas or drawing them with pastels. My inspiration for these drawings was a paper I wrote for history on The Innovation of Jazz. I wanted to capture the essence of early Jazz in cities like New Orleans and Harlem. The drawings by Christopher Dean Myers helped me do so.
 * Q2**










 * Quarter 3**

For this quarter I didn't draw or paint anything. I didn't make any tangible art. Instead I wrote poetry. I wrote a series of poems and recorded myself performing them.

media type="file" key="poem 1.m4a" width="72" height="30" Saturday morning 1:45 am. Terrell walks in. head down feet slowly dragging across the floor. The dirt tracks he leaves are nothing like the track marks on his arms that have extracted the beauty out of his once mahogany toned skin. He looks like death, takes long drawn out struggled breaths but still manages to keep a cigarette pressed between his puffed purple black lips. Can you see him? Posted on the corner of 30th and Tasker? Pockets laced with dime bags and his grandmothers insulin needles. Did he ever dream of being an 18yr old junkie? He was supposed to be big man on campus. Morehouse graduate with a degree in political science. Unfortunately he couldn’t escape the draft of poverty. So now he’s a toy solider turned real life boy soldier trynna make it through this concrete jungles he calls home. A place where most nights sound like Penns Landing on the 4th of July. Cause around here the diminishing of lives is louder than life itself. It’s a war zone. Where the soldiers are junkies that trick on the track shoot crack where love should reside cause they’ve already decided that powdered death cost less. Do you know how much it cost to love a junkie? It’s more than the numerous times bill money comes up missing cause he’s thirsting for the kind of coke you can’t sip from a can. It’s more than the countless nights his grandmother spends on the souls of her knees praying he comes home Cause like me, she too has those ugly nightmares of him frigid and stiff stuffed in a body bag, body bagged with cocaine and heroin. So each night she welcomes him in whether it’s 2:30 or 5am. And never once asks the question where he’s been. But I can no longer be silent Cause my brother is dying from trynna fly higher than his wings have allowed him. And I’m afraid the only thing that can bring him down is an overdose on the dope that he uses to cope with the things he can’t deal with. You see he was always trynna be superman, never content with being Clark Kent. I guess no one ever told em it was dangerous to fly high But I’m begging him to make the pen his needle. Inject deliverance into the crevasses of his soul. So that every time he speaks he sings a redemption song. Each verse making him stronger than the last. I don’t wanna remember when he was KING. I want him to be KING. Cause Terrell, time still hangs from your neck, just don’t run too fast.
 * Poem 1:**

media type="file" key="Poem 2.m4a" width="72" height="30"
 * Poem 2:**

She always knew he liked jazz but she never thought he’d mistake her neck for a saxophone. His fingers clasp her windpipes, creating shrieking melodies. It’s the wailing of her soul. She’s dying. From an unloving lover, who loves too violently, too silently His I love yous are whispered through weeping forest flesh welts, but she’s a black belt in domestic violence, so she jus takes it It all started at 15 when daddy first, stole segments of her soul to crude stanzas, slandered her body to bass line beats, broke her hymen to heinous hymns of ignorance He crossed her waistline like the check out line checking out her innocence.He did it all in the name of love 7 years later and this is what she believes to be love Moments that not only rob her of words but breath 50 blows to the chest 15 black Saturn rings around the eye She’s on her way to becoming another battered bride Preparing to marry grim reaper groom Death penalties of misery She wears 22 years roughly around thin shoulders Sports baggy eyelids like the latest shades But worst of all Goes through being a battered woman as if it were a teenage phase It’s all just too simple His dirty fingertips kiss bruises on her cheeks He's an artist His fingers scalpels Cutting through her taunted flesh She just wishes he’d realize his hands were meant to catch sunbeams. Arrest happiness and hold it in the bars of his palms. Then finger-paint it over her broken smile. She wishes he knew the pain he caused The pain of loving a man who only loves with his fist Who doesn’t know his potential. Cause he can’t see that when he spins that basketball on his brown fingers He’s spinning the world. But he’ll throw it all away in netted baskets just to spend his whole life chasing after it. He doesn’t know he has something special. And special is she But she’s convinced that He’s the sun. She’s earth. And he sustains her So she’ll proceed to run round and round in circles for him. Till one day he explodes and it’ll be the death of her. But she still believes in love Not even the nails screeching across her heart will stop her From churning her tears to candy coated raindrops She’ll save them for the sweetest love The love of oneself Cause she has to love herself past insecurities Past physical attraction Love herself in fractions Till she becomes whole again And maybe then she’ll see that she’s worth more than the tainted lust every man she’s ever loved ever had to offer her. But until that day she’ll remain another colored girl swallowing pieces of rainbows like pills considering suicide when the violence is enuf.

Again for this quarter I didn't draw anything, I wrote poems. But this time I experimented with different forms of poetry such as haiku.
 * Quarter 4 Art Work**

__**Haikus**__

Send your tongue into A gyrating Jubilee Honor Poetry

May God Bless Stevie Harmonizing such insight Through Blind Open Eyes

His black skull smashed in The South still whistles death notes I write for Emmet

Brooklyn Brownstone nights Scratch vinyls over skylines Sounds of the city

Feeling Kinda Blue I take the Coltrane to Miles Finding Jazz is Key

Crooklyn was real life Eviction and Foodstamps spat onto TV screens

__**Beauty**__

Have you ever seen beauty. Let it drip through your fingers like an unfinished sunset intangible beauty

The type that doesn't fit into pageant boxes, 6-packs or size 2 jeans It isn't passed down through family genes

I'm talking about unseen beauty the kind only a blind man knows Through waltzing his fingers across his loves face He memorizes the pricks of her venus fly trap lashes He's a master of description and doesn't need pupils to see that beauty is universal

We have yet to show this kind of beauty, so I challenge you to Put a 7yr old boy solider in Darfur on the cover of ebony He a true ebony beauty bleeds bullets for tears Fears being force fed hate through shot gun butts and machetes always standing ready and steady to kill

He is taught to see beauty in the kill twitching violently like death gone happy Look into his blood dark diamond eyes and see if his beauty doesn't dribble down your spine he is innocence at its finest

I wanna see VH1 give a Haitian refugee Torn from her native tongue and family her own reality show Showing the beauty of her reality - a poor homeland Cool waters that wail the cries of clay skinned grandmothers History brimming in their frown lines She now frowns at the border lines between them

Televise the beauty of her young swollen belly port au prince prince wading through colossal picassos of human fossils etched deep in the crevasses of poverty. Televise the beauty of true reality ˙ The point is everyone has beauty pouring from their silhouettes like liquid fire from the sun So stop getting caught in the whirl of pick lines that make dimes believe their beauty is only limited to a 10 know that you can't put a number on a smile thats battled more frowns than the town of Jericho You can't rate a body thats ate more lies than dead beat dads feed unnourished seeds.

Maybeline will make you believe you need to shadow your beauty put a line of lies in front of your eyes But you gotta realize that your beauty's tattooed on your soul it's tap dancing on your tongue Fox trotting on your tonsils Just let it out