This linear portrait of six heads by Jahlil Nzinga is a perfect embodiment of the artist’s raw, intuitive technique. Nzinga’s highly emotive compositions distill his personal visual, emotional, and intellectual surroundings into loose and liberated visual compositions that provoke wonder. As a child growing up in the Bay Area, Nzinga performed in his mother’s theater company, the first all Black theater troupe in California. Later on in his teenage years, Nzinga was a founding member of groundbreaking Bay Area Hip Hop group The Pack. The lessons he learned on stage about intuition and improvisation have a profound influence on Nzinga’s painting practice. His approach to every painting is to let subconscious intuition guide his hand. Similarly to the automatic drawing technique, each mark leads to the next mark until the subject matter of the painting reveals itself. “I go paint, and then these paintings talk to me,” Nzinga says. “They tell me they remind me of my thoughts, my emotions; they pull things out of me. There is no destination that I’m aware of, but I’m always there to arrive.”