Marcellous Lovelace: Artist’s Statement

     “African (Af Ra Kam) People and Soul Black People and Art Struggle and reality all bring out a certain vibe in me. I am inspired by myself and my family (soul) to create images and sound for all the right reasons. For the love of myself and my kind – complete oneness with love and thought for the original people – if you be your self and not anyone else, you can express your self better, or just give up because it is not meant to be learned to build from within to connect.”  -- Marcellous Lovelace

     When it all started: Born in 1975, Marcellous Lovelace is almost a completely self-taught artist. From a very young age, Marcellous has been into art. Raised and bred on the South side, Marcellous began drawing pictures from his favorite cartoons. He has long had a sense for color and style. His favorite subject is the human form or the figure. Whether it is an action hero with a muscular shape, or a nude Black woman with a smooth, well-defined shape, he has always been spellbound by the human shape.

     Marcellous credits his stubborn individuality to elementary school teachers who did not teach him well. He cites the title of Jawanza Kunjufu’s important book, The Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, as the reason he encountered so much negativity. Marcellous eventually took his own route by doing more sketching in class, then passing and dealing with a lot of moving during his early school years. Still, he had to deal with many places where he did not fit in, causing him to become self-contained and very creative in places such as Radcliff, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee.   

     To Marcellous, art is the motivation from inside to express his deepest emotions – energy in motion – on a two-dimensional object, or, in layman’s terms, a piece of paper. Reading about African people in America, he has come up with many moods for his story, from slavery to the deepest love a mother has for her son who steals from her to survive in the everyday struggle.

     Music is another driving force that keeps Marcellous’ mind occupied, be it the most conscious of hip hop or the jazz of Alice Coltrane. Marcellous has a love for his people’s creativity in sound. Music is a driving factor in a studio too small for him to paint or even live in. Marcellous does not have a studio. His earliest paintings began on the living room floors and kitchen tables of his mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other homes. Today, he paints in many different mediums, from oil (“Too expensive,” he says), to acrylic, pastels, (his favorite,) glue, magazines, house paint, shoe polish, Georgia red dirt, and your simple household ink pens. “All together or separate, it can be worked out,” he says.

     Art is this man’s passion…besides the many relationships with women that have caused many different stages of design and inspiration from his Southern-born family, a family that he loves more than anything in this universe.

     From all these places and experiences, Marcellous has become a better artist, and today he is able to socialize with a wider variety of people and create more with any tools.

     “Time,” Marcellous says, “is infinite.”