What does it mean for a Black man to paint the sublime?

For my grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Robinson — a sharecropper born in 1886, just twenty years post Emancipation— even entertaining the sublime felt like a kind of heresy. But for me, his grandson, making an abstract landscape painting is the purest form of protest.



Nature poses an existential question: where does humankind belong in the world? Today that question mutates: what would a world without humans look like? For Black artists working with land, these queries carry extra weight. How do you reckon with having been forced to toil a place you were never allowed to own? How do you translate that history into the image of a sky at dusk?



As race constrains Black artists within the pressures and contradictions of postcolonial life, I keep returning to a simple, urgent challenge: how do I portray the feeling of a sunset — its light, its loss, its claim — without erasing the labor and history beneath it?



In just two generations, my grandfather Rev. Robinson’s grandson — me — has gained the privilege to stand in the landscape and translate that experience into paint. That very freedom to create is itself an act of protest: it declares my presence and insists on my right to define myself, to claim vision, and to belong to the land. My work exists in conversation with this legacy: a dialogue between dispossession and imagination, between inherited memory and liberated form.