Something Has to Work Itself Out: Bhare's Layered Paintings

Around the end of 2018, halfway through college and working and moving between apartments, Bhare had more feeling than language. He couldn't explain what was happening to him. What he could do was make something and point at it.

"I made this little sun over here because I had this sort of feeling today," he says. The art was a reference he could gesture toward when the words wouldn't come.

His hands were behind his ideas, though. He'd think of something he wanted to paint and lack the skill to build it, so instead of abandoning it he wrote it down in a journal to come back for later.

"Sometimes I figured out how to do the one little skill a week later," he says. "Sometimes I didn't learn it until four years later."

He's twenty-eight now and still paints out of those journals, opening to a page from 2020, a feeling recorded by someone much younger who didn't fully understand it, and finally having the hands to render it. He banked what he couldn't use, trusting he would eventually.

He never knew he wanted to be an artist. He knew he wanted to make things, which is a different problem, and it sent him through band classes, dance lessons he describes as going very poorly, and a culinary track. The earliest art was elementary school clay sculptures, displayed in the lobby where students voted on them. Then nothing for a decade.

He came back his senior year of high school only because he needed a class to fill his schedule, and he was terrible at it for an instructive reason. He'd decided in advance what good art was, and what it was, he figured, was hyperrealism. "I was very, very terrible at it," he says, cheerfully. His grade didn't improve until he drifted somewhere looser and more abstract, closer to what he makes now. Then he quit again for two or three years.

Bhare was born in New York, grew up in Southern Maryland, and is the first generation of his family born in America. Everyone else is from Barbados, where church is woven into daily life. He was in the pews before he could conceive of what was happening, Southern Baptist, because his parents brought him. He never once had a spiritual experience there.

"It always felt like a little club of friends every single time I went," he says. Church camp appealed for the road trip. "I wasn't excited to go to church camp, I was just excited to go see a new state."

Until third grade he attended a primarily Black church, and after that a primarily white one, and he clocked the difference immediately, in how they practiced and how people treated each other. What soured him came near the end of high school, when he found himself inside a permanent worst-case scenario, convinced that stepping outside the rules would bring catastrophe. It made him judgmental of others and merciless with himself the moment he needed to be, in his words, a little bit more human.

He doesn't go back and doesn't expect to. He still paints it constantly, because it built him.

He has a culinary certification and a bachelor's in restaurant management, and he graduated into 2020, when every restaurant job he had evaporated.

"Now that I'm only working ten hours this week doing to-go orders," he remembers thinking, "I have nothing but time."

What he did with it was methodical. In a restaurant class he'd learned that the first five years determine whether a new restaurant survives. He decided the same applied to an art practice, wrote himself a five-year plan running 2020 to 2025, and hit it. He started a second in 2026 and is in year one now.

Everything else was scavenged. He worked on craft-store canvas panels with the cheapest paints available, because that was what he could afford. "I'll just make do with the materials that are here," he says. He grew up thrift shopping with his grandmother, and the habit never left. Last year he built pieces from upholstery scraps collected at a recycling event, fabric furniture makers were about to throw out.

"If I can use it and it makes sense, then I'll use it," he says. He ties it back to the island, where somebody's leftover dress fabric becomes somebody else's bag. "The sharing of these things is very akin to the sharing of ideas."

His first real sale was a 24-by-36 abstract listed for around a thousand dollars on a Wix site he admits was badly built. It sat a few weeks, then sold. "It's not a long shot anymore."

The title comes first, which surprises people.

"My approach is that the title is actually the first thing that I do," he says. "Ironically." His journals are full of fragments and sentences that stop abruptly, and the titles inherit that texture, sometimes with grammar errors he leaves in deliberately. A title like Stale Allergy Medicine orients him toward the whole piece before a mark is made.

The text inside the paintings is engineered to mislead you. If there's a blue car in the composition, he might paint the words yellow plane beside it.

"That's just to throw off the scent," he says, "and almost force the viewer to ask questions as to why it's there." We assume words beside an image explain it. He'd rather you either reconstruct what he meant or invent something he never intended. "I see it as a little bit of a word search."

The building process is collage logic applied to paint. He makes word maps with small drawings beside them, blocks in a background, decides whether the scene needs a tree or a building, then runs a long cycle of addition and subtraction, burying what fails under a coat of paint, adding something new, restoring something old elsewhere.

"Sometimes I have five different paintings layered on top of each other," he says. The cost is that nothing is repeatable. "I don't feel like I have a very firm style," he says, and then, of his own finished work, "I don't think I can replicate that again."

He knows a piece is done:. "When my head goes a little bit silent," he says, that's the signal to let it go out into the ether.

His first residency put the philosophy under load. He built everything from scratch, including a fourteen-foot frame he constructed wrong three times, because the supplier shipped canvas six inches short and he'd trusted the order sheet instead of remeasuring.

"Despite having five years of painting experience under my belt, I felt extremely green," he says. When shipping fell through, he rented a U-Haul and drove the painting ten-plus hours himself.

The work was pointed, built around how rarely Black artists and other minorities are recognized in major award seasons despite their cultural impact. Everything came together while everything went wrong, and he wouldn't trade it.

People assume things are going smoothly for him, and he isn't hiding anything when they do. He's just constitutionally optimistic. Plenty goes wrong. He keeps a running tally of what he's already done and lets that carry him.

"Something has to work itself out."

Next is a video artwork, his first in over a year, a one-of-one set in August, an edition release in September, and hopefully travel outside North Carolina for residencies and fairs.

Bhare's three: horror manga, which he found hunting for book recommendations and stayed for the draftsmanship. "They have a crazy, crazy pen game," he says, singling out No Longer Human and the discovery that it adapts an autobiography into horror. Pokopia, the Animal Crossing version of Pokemon, good for placing blocks and building a town when his brain needs a reset. And Love Island, which he's working through with his fiancé.

He wants it on record that none of this is intellectual. "Sometimes I really wish I had more intellectual things to tell people," he says, "like, oh yeah, I was studying this and that. But I honestly don't have the brainpower for it."