A lot of the work around this project is to reach out to the younger generation and hopefully give a sense of empathy. Each portrait is a careful study of the victim, their families, and presents them as they might have been today if that final bullet did not pierce through them. What would these young people have been able to acheive if only they had been allowed to live. If only... 

Being a parent is hard. Being a child without a parent is harder still. Oftentimes, being a father is a complex role to fill with many expextations, naunces, and sterotypes to battle. However, the sterotype of the absentee father is not performed by choice by any of these younger victims.  What would they have taught their children they left behind? 

A mother is the one parent we are often told that needs to take care of the children and home. What happens when they are taken away not by choice but by force? Being a young mother is never easy and yet these mothers have paid the ultimate price anyone person could ever pay. Each stroke and each color is performative; like a mother stroking a child's hair. 

Orphan; the loss of ones parents.

Widow; the loss of ones spouse. 

However, there is no word in English that applies to parents who have lost children. Perhaps it is because the very idea of losing ones children is so horrible that we have never wanted to create such a terribly wounded word. 

Children are the hardest for me to paint, to imagine, especially the children whose own parents decided to remove them from this world; their rights to that title, of a parent, seem wrong and distrubing. 

These couples found wonder and beauty within each other. Some people sought to destroy their bonds, either knowingly or unknowingly; a bullet cannot tell the difference. 

Many victims turn out to be artists themselves. From muscians, painters, singers, and many others, these artistic sould were taken way before their time. 

The greatest pain that a community can feel is not only losing perhaps a few of its members but whole families either at the same time or watching them slowly getting picked off. These victims represent the reality of what we are living and the way these outsider weapons kill communities. 

The thought of losing a child is unimaginable; the thought of losing more is utterly destroying. These victims represent the heartbreaking reality of many families, especially in Baltimore. 

One of the great things about growing older is knowing many things about life, living, and hopefully, happiness. This group illustrates the huge loss of wisdom that these victims could have passed on to their communities and their families either verbally or through their actions. Although they had more time on this earth than some of the other victims, they too were taken before they should have gone. 

These brave veterans survived the horrors of war only to come home and be shot in their own city. The victims here illustrate that perhaps the streets of Baltimore are more deadly and dangerous than those found abroad.