The finely detailed image of a painted self-portrait, depicting a young black man's face, is profoundly moving in its evocation of grief and anger. The eyes are clenched shut and the mouth gapes in a silent wail; the spread fingers of one hand grasp the left side of his skull as though, by squeezing his own pain, it will all somehow dissipate.

The piece is called "Cry Blood" and the artist, Alfredo Carlson of North Stonington, created the work in response to the death in March of his father, Kurt Carlson, who with his wife Elaine — a white couple — adopted Alfredo 15 years ago from an orphanage in Port au Prince, Haiti.

"The whole idea of 'Cry Blood' is anguish and anger at what we lost," Carlson says. Now 25, he's seated on a lovely spring morning with his mother in comfortable lawn chairs placed with social distancing in the front yard of their home. Leaning against Alfredo Carlson's chair is another painting called "Man of Sorrows."

It's similar in composition to "Cry Blood" but, where the original piece is rooted in the detailed artistic nuance of realism, "Man of Sorrows" is rendered in bright, tropical tones and has a jagged, slightly abstract feel — as though Francis Bacon and Paul Gaugin had collaborated on an interpretation of the first painting.

In fact, Carlson was using the emotion and image of the first work in a more expansive but still thematic fashion. It was painted a few weeks later, after the murder of George Floyd.

"'Man of Sorrows' is more than just a replication of the 'Cry Blood,'" Carlson says. "There are many of the same emotions involved. But this time the source of those feelings came from an effort to provide the viewer with a depiction of the Black Experience at this point in time."

Interestingly — and in that impromptu fashion art sometimes has — Carlson, who is naturally right-handed, painted "Man of Sorrows" with his left hand. "I was so uptight with emotion and grief that I just switched to my left; it was looser, and I could paint."

Carlson believes this recent wave of creativity on canvas is not just emotional response to events in his personal life and in the world. There's also the matter that he just happened to be home in North Stonington rather than at the University of Delaware, where he's pursuing his master's degree in fine arts. Working principally as a sculptor, Carlson went home at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, leaving the bulk of his sculpting equipment at his campus studio. Then, when his father died, followed shortly by the Floyd murder and subsequent protests and unrest, the only way he could artistically respond was through the paint and brushes he'd left at home.

From Haiti to Connecticut

Elaine and Kurt Carlson were empty nesters when they visited Port au Prince in 2005. In addition to his job as a health physics technician at Millstone Nuclear Power Station, Carlson was an ordained minister; Elaine is an audiologist and very active in their church. Though the two had undertaken numerous mission trips, the purpose in visiting Haiti in 2005 was in an observational capacity while their daughter, Bethany Browne, was helping at an orphanage.

"We had no intention of adopting a child," Elaine Carlson says with a gentle smile of wonder on her face. "But the first day, we were seated in a circle, and Alfredo leaned over and smiled at me. Over a few days, we started hanging around together, and I could feel myself getting attached to him."

But with her husband in poor health and both of them getting older, her blossoming desire to adopt Alfredo wasn't realistic. Then, returning to North Stonington, Elaine got very ill. Local doctors couldn't isolate what was wrong, and she was bedridden and feverish for a month before coming out of it.

"Throughout it all, Alfredo was in my thoughts, and I had this sort of dreamy confidence that everything would work out," she says. "I kept praying about it." On her first trip out of the house after recovering, she and her husband went to the beach, where Elaine decided to pour her heart out to Kurt about Alfredo. "I was telling him everything I'd been feeling about Alfredo — and Kurt just suddenly said, 'Yes.' I guess he knew what I was leading up to."

It took 14 months to make all the arrangements and deal with various bureaucratic details, and the Carlsons were only able to communicate with Alfredo in very limited fashion. Ultimately, the young man made it to North Stonington and his new family. In addition to Bethany and her husband, Alfredo gained a new big brother, Brian, who is also married. And Alfredo now has 12 nieces and nephews. He's also rediscovered his biological younger sister and brother, who were separated from him at the orphanage. They're both well, and they're all in close touch.

New life

Though Alfredo couldn't read or write and spoke no English, hard work and a double dose of schooling — home instruction as well as public education — ensured he made up ground quickly in Connecticut. And though the racial demographics of North Stonington are overwhelmingly white, Alfredo's middle school actually had some diversity. That he was black in a white family was fairly non-eventful for the first years.

"We weren't allowed to watch much television," Alfredo says, "so my understanding of the vastness of American culture was more a matter of discussion and on a day to day absorption based on what might be happening. I think the first time I experienced diversity on a large scale was when we'd take winter vacations to Florida. Whether it was animals or people, I saw so much life I'd never experienced. It was amazing and served as an introduction."

While Alfredo doesn't particularly remember when a genuine fondness for art took hold, Elaine reminds him that, almost at once, he'd be drawing constantly and, she says, "he took such care to stay between the lines and worry about details. It was clear he was instantly good at it and had talent."

For his part, Alfredo says he would doodle constantly while taking notes in class or listening to lectures. "My teachers thought I wasn't paying attention," he says, "but drawing was my way of actually focusing on what they were teaching me. It sounds strange, but it worked."

He graduated with honors from Wheeler High School, where he played soccer and was slowly developing a more formal interest in art. He was working in pastels and, independent of any instruction or awareness of technique, started to grind the pastels into powder and use his thumbs to apply the material to paper. That led to his first experiences with painting.

"I just loved the idea and reality of mixing colors," he says. "With paint instead of pastels, I just thought it'd be pretty much the same thing, right?" He laughs. "But it wasn't. And that was OK, too."

Intro to racism

High school, though, was also where he started to learn more about bigotry.

"It started to sink in as I was reading textbooks and learning about history," Carlson. "And I slowly started having personal experiences and it occurred to me things were maybe a lot more messed up than I thought." 

One day at Wheeler, it got personal. One white student suddenly approached Alfredo, who was standing in the hall with a group of friends, and said, "I've got a problem with you. I don't like black people."

The commentary escalated until finally, Alfredo says, "I just popped him in the nose." The other kid got in trouble for starting the incident, and Alfredo didn't and, more importantly, the two became friends.

"That fight shocked me," Alfredo says. "I didn't understand why it happened. But once we were friends, he was the one who helped me understand a whole lot of why some people had that attitude. In his case, it went back to his father. That happens a lot."

Another time, returning one night from his job at the amusement park at Misquamicut Beach, driving in the flow of traffic, Alfredo was pulled over. Quickly, four patrol cars surrounded him, and police were barraging him with questions from all sides. He was allowed to finally leave — with a hefty speeding ticket — but the relentless nature of the incident made a big impression.

The world of art

After high school, Alfredo began to concentrate on his arts studies — first for two years at Three Rivers Community College. There, he got interested in sculpture, where he won a school-wide award for his rendition of a minotaur. As with his segue from pastels to paint, the move to sculpting was harder than it looked — and that was part of the fun.

"Working in clay, I thought, 'Hey, this is 3D. I can walk around it, see it from all angles, develop a relationship with it," he says.

From there, Carlson matriculated at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art with a focus on sculpture and painting. While he worked and refined technique with his assignments, though, he continued to watch what was going on in the world with changes in politics and society over the last few years. He says his senior project, a sculpture called "Can I Live," was one of his first works to make an overt statement.

A finely detailed work several feet high, "Can I Live" is a bas relief image of a giant tree with a gnarled root system and bare, forked branches reaching for the sky. Suspended against the trunk is a naked man frozen in crucifixion. Carved in small letters on the the bark of the tree and hidden in the roots and branches, are the names and even a few faces of black people who have been killed by police over the years.

Acknowledging that "Can I Live" seemed to take both his fellow students and faculty members by surprise, Carlson says, "You know, it was the end of the year assignment and so much was happening at the time (in terms of the killings of black civilians by police), and I wanted to do something that spoke for all the victims. But the more research I did, the more I learned. The whole issue goes very deep, and there are a lot of roots. I wanted, when people get close to look at it, they have to be careful to see what they're stepping on."

Into the future

After graduation from the Lyme Academy, Carlson was accepted into the masters fine arts program at the University of Delaware where he was at work when the coronavirus hit and he returned home — fortuitously, it turns out. He was with his mother when his father took a turn for the worse and passed away on March 24 — and that's when he started painting his most recent pieces. He's selling a lot of work and accepting commissions, and finds it all healing and rewarding (to see samples access Instagram at alfredocarlson_studios).

"I think 'Cry Blood' really helped my mother and my sister," he says slowly. "I hope so. It definitely helped me. And I've been painting so much and jotting down so many ideas since George Floyd. A lot of the artists I know or admire are doing the same thing, and I think you're going to see a lot of work come out of all this."

He pauses. "You know, back at the orphanage, I had nightmares all the time. When I got adopted and came to live here, the nightmares stopped. That's an incredible thing. When my dad died, though, they came back. I was so overwhelmed — and I think that's why I found my old paints and canvas and started to work. And the nightmares stopped."