My plan emerged from a scrap of plywood in my father's cabinet shop in 2006. While squeezing into an improvised studio covered in sawdust and cuts of wood, I made "Vitamin C". This monochrome orange painting was my first articulation of warmth, joy, love, and spirit. It is the sun that defines Florida and my paintings are an attempt to let the sun speak through a diverse and paradoxical series of subjects: the improvised life raft of Haitian immigrants, the black and turquoise sky of Belle Glade - one of the nation's poorest farming communities; the grey and deep blue swells of rough seas; and the garish sticky palette of Miami, to name a few.

My Energy Plan is renewable: to delineate and paint the beauty and love of a place that is often hidden in the shadows of alienating pursuits. The condition of Florida is generally one of sickness. These paintings are humble healing agents. They are my modest yells, sighs, screams, laughs, sobs, whispers, and declarations of my anger and my love.

This plan is the result of a homecoming. After living elsewhere for over sixteen years, I found that I had changed even more than Florida had. Most of Florida's changes made it a more interesting and culturally seductive place to live in. My changes inspired me to take the existential agony of returning to a place I felt so at odds with and turn it into a material to manipulate for more joyful ends.
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-Jorge Griego