Israel McCloud

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work explores memory, identity, belonging, and the ways our environments shape how we understand ourselves. Working primarily through figurative painting, I draw from personal experiences, music, photographs, and fleeting moments from everyday life. Born in Sacramento and raised between Houston and the Bay Area, I moved frequently throughout my childhood. This constant change shaped my understanding of identity, belonging, and the feeling of being both connected to and outside of a place. That experience continues to inform my work. I use figures, environments, color, and fragments of memory to create scenes that feel familiar but slightly removed from reality—as though they exist somewhere between a remembered experience and an imagined one. More recently, I have become increasingly interested in flowers and their relationship to the figure. Flowers represent growth, beauty, memory, and impermanence, while also allowing me to explore atmosphere and emotion through color. Ultimately, my paintings are an attempt to make intangible experiences tangible: taking moments, emotions, and memories that might otherwise fade and giving them a new life through paint.

Artwork