I Sampled True Love

For years my work has been built on one simple idea: sampling.

“I sampled true love” is a line from a song by Erykah Badu. In it, she pays homage to hip hop as her muse. That idea of sampling, lifting, layering, reworking and ultimately honouring a source has shaped my practice for years.

I once considered myself primarily a painter, hand painting lyrics onto abstract canvases. Then one day I saw a wall that demanded to be used. Around this time I had begun cutting letters in cardboard relief from material found in the street. The words came off the canvas and returned to the wall.

During that process something else happened.

Working with the cardboard, I would often paint over earlier lyrics and rotate the board before settling on a final composition. The surface became layered, fragmented, almost camouflaged. A kind of palimpsest. It began to develop an all over density that echoed early Cubism, where figure and ground collapse into a unified field and the surface refuses hierarchy.

At times it veered toward a wildstyle energy reminiscent of early graffiti and the structural complexity of writers like Kase 2, whose fractured letterforms redefined movement and density.

But the relief pieces needed clarity. I wanted them to jump off the wall. To confuse. To ask: how can that texture sit on that surface?

Rather than abandon the layered aesthetic, I began using the relief works as stencils for new canvases and paper pieces.

Over the last twenty years this language has evolved. With a more refined palate, I feel I am distilling something quieter now. A restrained presence that still carries the DNA of its original muse.

There is a direct correlation between the street version of “I sampled true love” and the paper works that followed.

In the coming weeks I will share more reflections from the studio and the evolution of these works.

I’m hoping to do monthly mailouts with updates too, so if you’d like to be the first to hear, please sign up to my mailing list here.

Thank you for following the journey.