In Chasing Ghosts, the seated figure emerges as both a portrait and a homage — a quiet salute to Bill Traylor, the self-taught African American artist who began drawing in his eighties, distilling a lifetime of memories, folklore, and personal history into stark, poetic imagery. His work, made from the fragments of his life in the rural South, speaks to resilience, creative urgency, and the haunting persistence of memory.
The name B. Traylor is etched into the wall like a ghost mark, anchoring him in the space while hinting at the ephemeral nature of legacy. The scene — spare yet charged — places him at a table with simple, symbolic objects: a black dog, a glass of water, a blue jug holding a burst of green. These elements feel dreamlike, as though drawn from the subconscious, much like Traylor’s own fluid blending of reality and imagination.
Chasing Ghosts is not an attempt to imitate Traylor’s style, but to channel his spirit — the way he captured truth with economy, and how he transformed the everyday into something timeless. In this work, Traylor becomes both subject and metaphor: a reminder that the past is never fully gone, and that the creative impulse can outlive its maker, chasing us across time.