The Series · 2024–2026

Everything They Didn't Tell Me

Ten paintings · four acts · on the distance between what happened and what got written down

I paint the conversations that society quietly ignores.

The faces fragment because the men inside them are made to carry two readings at once: gentle, hardworking, a father — and in the same breath a killer, an animal, something to be afraid of. The visible seams are that contradiction, held in one head. I don’t paint faces; I cast parts.

Everything They Didn't Tell Me began with a title that arrived before the paintings — a phrase for what nobody had passed down. The series is ten paintings in four acts: Micro, Collision, Macro, Wisdom. They move from the interior — psychological, personal — outward to the systemic: labor, entertainment, environment, and what a culture does to the people it needs.

Every canvas begins on a yellow-ochre ground. It is the color the European tradition called “flesh,” as if one skin were the default — a color you could buy in a box under that name until 1962. The whole surface is that assumption before a single figure exists, and the figure is built on top of it. The ground is not background. It is the argument the painting is answering.

I came to painting from theatre, which I studied at Columbia College Chicago, and from years of working as a musician. I am self-taught as a painter, and I still build a picture like a scene — every figure is doing two things at once. Oil stick sits on top of the acrylic and stays a gesture, closer to annotation than to paint: marking up a record somebody else printed.

These are think pieces. Mental dens. They are built to make someone ask whether what they know is the truth, or whether they have been lied to their whole life — the kind of conversation you start in front of the people whose opinion you care about, because everyone is standing in their own bubble.

I went and found what I wasn't given. The work hands it back — as wisdom rather than comfort.

Biography

Andre René Epps Jr. (b. Chicago) builds portraits where text, symbol, and figure collide — men made to carry two readings at once, and the visible seams where those readings meet. He presses Black interior life against the labor, environmental, and cultural systems that shape it. Every canvas begins on a yellow-ochre ground, the color the European tradition called “flesh.” He came to painting from theatre at Columbia College Chicago and from years as a working musician, and is self-taught as a painter. His ten-painting series Everything They Didn’t Tell Me (2026) moves in four acts from the personal to the systemic. The artist lives and works in Atlanta.

Lineage

Built on a lineage of Black witness. In the image: Gordon Parks, who made the camera testify; Kerry James Marshall, who insisted on Black presence at the center of the picture. In the word: James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, who named what was never meant to be said.

It works a second tradition too — appropriation turned back on the culture that made it. Robert Colescott put racist stereotype inside history painting and refused to let anyone laugh their way out. He changed who was in the frame; I don’t replace anyone — I paint the mechanism that decided who got seen. Kara Walker made the viewer complicit by looking. In these paintings, Michigan J. Frog, KAWS, Banksy and Warhol are cast members, not references.

And Basquiat, whose collisions of text and figure on a single surface I work from directly — though where he crossed out words so you would see them more, I cross them out to record a label being revised while the transaction underneath stays the same.

How it is made
Support

Stretched cotton canvas, unframed. Nine works run between 36 × 48 and 48 × 60 inches; the tenth is 36 × 24. Dead Riding Dead is painted over a real dealership service receipt — the list of customers due that day, handed to me each morning at the job I was working while I made the series.

Ground

Gesso, then a yellow-ochre field laid across the entire surface before a single figure exists. The figure is built on top of that assumption rather than around it.

Build

Acrylic, in layers, working forward from the ground. The figure goes on last.

Oil stick

Applied over the acrylic, never beneath it. It stays a gesture rather than becoming paint — closer to annotation than to rendering, marking up a record somebody else printed.

The seams

Painted. Nothing here is collaged, cut, adhered or assembled, and there is no encaustic. The seams that look cut are made with a brush, and that distinction is the subject rather than the technique.

The eye

Frontal, oversized, ringed. The colour of the ring changes from figure to figure. The structure does not.

Time

Drawn in 2024. Painted in 2026.

The Work

The Ten Works

Four acts, read in sequence — from the interior outward to the systemic. Select any work to view it enlarged.

I Micro The interior — the self before the system reaches it.
II Collision Where the personal meets the systemic, head-on.
III Macro The system seen whole — labor, environment, the body politic.
IV Wisdom What remains, and what holds, after the reckoning.
Press

2026 “Featured Artist Spotlight,” Artdose Weekly · July 26, 2026

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