Toby Sisson

A volume of James Baldwin’s lesser known verses, “Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems,” inspired the creation of Black Tears in 2015. His writings chronicled the legacy of racial injustice in 20th-century America as well as his personal struggles with the homophobia of that era. While responding to his work with my own, I was struck by the parallels between the racial strife that Baldwin wrote about decades ago and the violence inflicted upon black bodies in America today. The widespread protests against these incidents in 2014-16 gave voice to our country’s collective sorrow. As I reflected on this communal expression of grief, I began drawing black tears as a way to contemplate my own sadness. It soon became a meditative act, a process that allowed me to grieve and create a visual elegy for the loss.

Although bodies are not depicted literally in my work, their presence is represented through the humanist content I engage. My practice examines the breadth of metaphoric meaning that can be derived from abstraction, especially psychological and social content as it relates to group identity. I make paradoxical concepts tangible with formal elements, such as the repeated use of the color black, which acts as both presence and absence, simultaneously weighted and ephemeral.

I value the associative power of abstract images for their capacity to suggest complex ideas with basic shapes and colors. Black’s strong correlation with solemnity, mystery, and race is an evocative visual tool. A spot of darkness can radically influence a field of white, yet at the same time, be utterly isolated from it. The contrast of opposites attracts and repels. I see obvious parallels in the way people interact across cultural difference, which in turn drives the graphic nature of my compositions.