He’s a rising star now, but the young Cy Gavin never thought he would become an artist. “To be an artist, for me, meant that you came from immense privilege,” he told artnet News. “I just loved art.” Gavin has already made his mark with haunting paintings that channel Expressionism and Symbolism to allegorizes African-American experience. The works are intricate. These colorful, enrapturing paintings, using acrylic and oil paint, render loosely abstracted landscapes, often incorporating dark black figures—phantom-like beings who become the centerpiece of each work. The results are stark, arresting, strange, and imaginative. The poses of Gavin’s figures are inspired by the dance traditions of the Caribbean and Bermuda. He has also taken to incorporating some of the natural materials he collected in Bermuda into his paintings (e.g. Bermudan pink sand, irises, etc.). “I paint with my body and not my wrist,” he says, describing his process of creating his paintings. Recently, Gavin has been creating wands out of metal tubing to extend his brush, inhibiting some control on his mark making, but gaining more distance from the canvas to think compositionally and engage with the entire surface of the painting.