Paper Jam

A young musician stands mid-motion against a deep red backdrop. A sheet of paper is adjacent to his face, where a trumpet is drawn across it. His spine arches back, his front leg extends, and his locs fly with the movement. He wears a blue varsity jacket with a white swirl at the shoulder, a layered white shirt, cuffed camouflage cargos, a beaded chain, and white sneakers. A red cup hangs from his outstretched hand, tipped and empty. Beneath his feet, loose sheets in the shape of a folded paper plane elevates him against the back drop.

Frank Morrison works the red background with visible palette marks, letting the surface carry text the way a wall would. White cursive script runs across the middle reading "Power Doesn't Power Trip."

A stenciled 1000 sits low on the canvas, half absorbed into the red and threaded with scrawled line. A small torn fragment is worked into the paint near the top edge. Morrison leaves all of it open.

Paper Jam comes from Morrison's newer body of work. The subject matter will feel familiar to collectors who have followed him for years, music, movement, and Black youth rendered with the elongated figures that made his name. The handling is different. The graffiti elements that once decorated the background have moved to the front of the painting, and stencil, script, and worked surface texture now sit on the same plane as the oil-rendered figure. It is the work of an artist still widening his range rather than repeating a formula.

Frank Morrison was born in 1971 and raised in New Jersey, where he was tagging walls before he was old enough to drive. A spot in a break dancing crew took him to Europe on tour, and a stop at the Louvre changed the direction of his life. He came home determined to teach himself what the Old Masters knew, then bent that training around the culture he came from, a style that has come to be called urban mannerism. Alongside his fine art career, Morrison has illustrated more than thirty children's books and holds Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, a John Steptoe Award, and NAACP Image Award recognition. His paintings hang in the collections of Queen Latifah, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Derek Jeter, and Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Every canvas he signs carries the notation TTG, "Thanks To God," a habit he has kept since the beginning.

Paper Jam measures 24 x 36 inches and is offered as a giclee on canvas, hand-signed and numbered by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity. Choose the unstretched canvas for your own framer, the gallery stretched canvas ready to hang, or the stretched canvas finished in a black floater frame.

Edition Sizes: Paper Jam is released in four tiers, seventy pieces in total. The Limited Edition is 50 archival giclees on canvas, signed and numbered. The Remarque edition is 10 canvas prints with hand-painted enhancements unique to each piece, signed and numbered. The Artist Proof edition is 5 canvas prints, individually hand-painted and signed. The Hors de Commerce edition is 5 hand-painted and signed canvas prints, the tier traditionally held back for private collections and exhibition use. Once a tier sells through, it is closed permanently.

This one belongs where the volume is. A music room, a studio, a home office, a stairwell that needs a jolt, or any wall that has been waiting for something loud enough to start a conversation.