I usually don’t paint celebrity portraits, but this case is different. My boyfriend Chappell and our mutual friend Jackie are both graduating from their School Counseling Program from Loyola University! I wanted to paint Jackie a gift, and her love of Kendrick’s music inspired me. Chappell’s favorite rapper is also K.Dot; it’s one of the things they both have in common. Chappell actually recommended that I choose Kendrick as the theme for the painting.

This painting is also very timely in that if you’ve been keeping up with the beef between Kendrick and Drake, it’s very clear that Kendrick won the battle. But in all honestly, it was never a real battle. Kendrick’s music is art while Drake’s music is mostly entertainment. Listening to K.Dot’s music, he is a masterful lyricist. His music is soulful, authentic, honest, and for me, profoundly spiritual. The masterful storytelling and raw emotion that he infuses into his music takes listeners on a journey of self-discovery of our humanity. There is no contest.

In this painting I wanted to celebrate Kendrick, Jackie and Chappell’s self-transformation through their own personal journeys. Jackie and Chappell have learned much about counseling and therapy and they have blessed me by sharing so much of their experience with me. Graduating from a program, or coming into oneself as an artist, is a spiritual and personal transformation, often that can’t be seen by the naked eye. There is one line in particular that inspired this painting. In his song, Poetic Justice*, Kendrick’s hook says, “If a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it.” To Kendrick, he is talking about the girl as the flower, asking himself if he should trust her. To me, this lyric is about trusting our own experience; if you don’t see something, does that mean it doesn’t exist or that we shouldn’t trust it? I feel like our own inner transformation can be profoundly beautiful and it’s hard to see on the outside.

Insight and wisdom arise within and while it does manifest in our words and actions, it is an inner experience that can’t really be put into words. Yet life calls us to trust our lived experience of self-transformation even if it’s difficult to talk about. As an artist, one of my main interests is to communicate the ineffable into imagery, to try to communicate something internal, mysterious, and transformative about the human experience. *(As a footnote, what is really also ironic about this song, is that it is 1 of 2 songs that Drake collaborated with Kendrick on – LOL!)

Congratulations to Jackie and Chappell for all their hard work and accomplishments! Jackie is going to be a School Counselor at Eastport Elementary School in Annapolis and Chappell will be working as a School Counselor at Patterson High School in Baltimore City. I’m so proud of them and excited to see how they continue to grow as help their students transform into their authentic selves.