We Were Animals Once

Description

We Were Animals Once (2025). This is a piece that envisions the layered realities of memory, culture, and place. Animals are our first toys (at least for some of us children of the 80’s) and memories of these tiny plastic tokens in the shape of animals that at that age we consider dangerous, but in playtime they become our friends. In the process they shape our personality into being separate from the animal, and denying or failing to see we are also animals. Because we are tiny  we are larger and in control of the animal now shrunk into a toy. This piece reflects directly on the sense Beneath a vast moon that glows like a cosmic guardian, toy animals and a child’s doll gather before the skyline of Queens, New York. A parrot—emblem of migration and survival—watches over this surreal assembly, carrying Caribbean memory into the urban landscape. The painting bridges the intimacy of childhood with the complexity of adult identity, recalling a time when small plastic animals became our first companions. Through play, we learned dominance and tenderness, forgetting that we too are animals. The layered composition—part dream, part recollection—merges nostalgia, diaspora, and ecological awareness. The toys, both fragile and eternal, speak to the persistence of imagination, the separation from innocence, and the universality of play. In the end, the work reminds us that our earliest understanding of kinship began with creatures, real and imagined, who continue to shape the stories of who we are. Childhood never leaves us, yet we become separate from it as adults. But in the end, as in the beginning, we all play with the same toys.

Dimensions: 48 in x 54 in. Original artwork painting. oil on canvas, some mixed media. .