Not long ago, I found myself listening to a lecture by the artist Margaret Bowland as part of the Bennett Schmidt lecture series. Her topic was timely, fraught, and deeply debated: What is appropriation? But it wasn’t her definition of appropriation that struck me. Instead, it was an observation she made right at the outset. She noted that many of her students come to her asking a fundamental question:

“What is it okay for me to paint?”

The moment those words left her mouth, something recoiled within me. What do you mean, what is it okay for you to paint? To me, that question is a non-sequitur. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the vocation. Asking what you are "allowed" to paint is a polite way of asking what you are forbidden to paint. The very question strikes a dagger into the heart of what it means to be an artist. It implies that before a brush even touches canvas, the artist must look around the room, read the cultural temperature, and seek a permission slip from the collective.

If you begin your creative process from a place of permission, I severely doubt you will ever create anything meaningful. You might occasionally manufacture something safe, something palatable, or something that makes you a bit of money. But you will never create anything important. You will never create anything that lasts.

For me, the question of what is "okay" to paint isn't just an academic debate; it is deeply personal.

As an African-American man, I know intimately what it means to have my freedom infringed upon. We live in a world and a country where black men are constantly navigating invisible boundaries. When you go to work, you cannot always express yourself the way you truly want to. You conform to a rigid set of social standings and corporate norms just to make your money, feed your family, and survive. Society demands our compliance, our rounding down of our sharp edges, every single day.

But art? The arena of art must be the one sphere entirely free from those suffocating concerns.

Art is the one environment where I demand total, uncompromising selfexpression. There is a certain sovereignty that comes with being an artist— a raw, inherent power. If we surrender that sovereignty to societal comfort or political correctness, we are willingly putting on the handcuffs that the world tries to place on us every day. Why would an artist ever invite the prison of social conformity into the studio?

There is an old saying: You can say or do anything you want in this world, as long as you are willing to pay the price.

I live by that. My own work—specifically my American Woman series, which fuses the aesthetic of pin-up art with the horrific history of lynching— deals with subject matter that makes people intensely uncomfortable. The imagery is provocative, the concepts are heavy, and the presentation refuses to offer the viewer an easy out. I am fully aware of the friction it causes.

But I am entirely willing to pay the price to say what I want to say, in exactly the way I choose to say it.

That is the bargain of true artistic freedom. The price might be criticism, discomfort, or alienation from certain galleries or audiences. But that price is infinitely cheaper than the cost of starving your own voice.

The reality is, if you're not willing to step out in your artistic sovereignty, if you're not willing to do something different, then you can be sure that most likely the only thing you move in this world—the only thing that will be moving in this world because of you—will be the dirt that is displaced when it’s time to bury you.

Art is not a customer service industry. It is not meant to validate current social taboos or comfort the viewer. Therefore, if your creative impulse starts with the question, "Is this okay?"—then I have a harsh truth to offer: Maybe art isn't for you. Maybe you aren’t actually an artist.

True art cannot be born from fear. If your decisions are infused with anxiety about boundaries before you even mix your paint, you are acting as an illustrator of acceptable opinions, not an artist.

We must recognize and fiercely guard our freedom. We must stop asking for permission to look at the dark, complicated, or controversial corners of human existence. The canvas is the last sovereign territory we have. If we don't possess the courage to rule it absolutely, we shouldn't be standing in front of it at all.