I’ve called myself an artist for as long as I can remember. At the beginning, I don’t think I appreciated what that title meant to myself; what creating would bring into my world and what I would give back to it. Growing up with a wandering mind, my mother found it to the benefit of her walls—and sanity—that I be given exposure to as many varied forms of creation, lest I become bored and again prey upon her home. I called myself an artist with a paint splattered apron and waterlogged easel.
As I got older and learned the tragedies of life, I learned how to escape within creation. I learned to use the stroke of my pen to speak without uttering a syllable and scream buried beneath the weight of empty decibels. My art leans into the sharper edges of my thoughts and gives me a place to lay my anxieties, my fears, and living nightmares. I called myself an artist with raw wrists in darkened rooms. When it came time to name my gift, to give it a solid place in my world, I named it Twisted Pencilz. I found it fitting as the quiet thoughts and emotions I placed within my pieces would require a perception as twisted as my own. Being an optimist at heart but a realist in action, many of my pieces have layers of emotion juxtaposed against one another and therefore can elicit a different response depending on what speaks loudest to my audience. My adopted pseudonym, “Ali Lujah,” was to be a play on my interactions as an artist and a person, something cheeky that fit the dynamics of my multi-faceted personality and paid due to the clients and friends that have been awed by my contribution to their worlds. I call myself an artist because I’ve touched different lives and words can never express how ethereal that connection is to me.