SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Homelessness, abuse, addiction and themes of love and despair wend their way through artist Franklin Sinanan's challenging work. Sinanan is the artist in residence at Birchwood Gallery until September. He held a solo show at the gallery last October.

Franklin Sinanan applies a stencil to an untitled painting of a Shango dancer. Shango is a god of thunder and lightning variously honoured in Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. He contemplated adding splashes of red paint to the canvas to represent the use of sacrifice used in some of the Shango ceremonies. Sinanan is an artist in residence at Birchwood Gallery. - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

The Toronto painter of Trinidadian-descent is creating a series of paintings called Life Under Construction while in Yellowknife.

"It's going through layers in a painting like an archaeologist would and taking the layers apart and putting it together again," he explained. "Like someone's life and what they've gone through. It's actually like going on a dig."

Self taught, Sinanan uses techniques common to urban graffiti artists, such as stenciled text and overlapped symbols, to create the depth that his paintings are known for. Reminiscent of the late New York painter of Haitian-descent, Basquiat, Sinanan's work often depicts the lives and emotions of people struggling to survive.

Many of the works in his oeuvre mischievously explore sex, violence, good and evil.

"It's what's going on in the world today and it's good to have a painting that speaks to you when you see it," he said. "Once I'm done everybody says it looks sad, depressing, but I don't think it is. There's a meaning to it."

Part of the work he is producing in Yellowknife is a study of some Haitian school boys resting in a doorway - drawn first in vivid colour, then in an aggressive contrast of black and white.

"They could be homeless. They could be abused. Or, they could just be boys going to school. You never know what the background is," he said.

His brighter use of colour on canvas captures the spectacle of Cuban dancers and other celebratory movement.

"When I paint I don't sketch anything out," he said. "The paintbrush just takes over. I don't think about what colour goes on, it just goes. It just comes out of my head right onto the canvas."

Sinanan was recently accepted for a three- to six-year residency at the South Florida Arts Centre, to which he will return in September. His work is on display at Birchwood Gallery and in the Elder Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, among other art spaces.

He is on site at Birchwood Gallery from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday.