A woman with brown skin and flowers embedded in her thick natural hair stands tall, bearing her breasts and natural curves. With a string of flowers draped across her chest and a printed shawl draped around her arms, she serves as the subject of one of many watercolor pieces painted by theatre senior Rio Jsanea.
Jsanea is no ordinary painter. Involved in orchestra, poetry, dance, production design, film and comics, painting is just one of Jsanea’s many artistic outlets. After being inspired by a YouTube artist, she began using watercolors when she was 22.
As a biracial woman, Jsanea didn’t grow up understanding her black heritage. Though her parents were high school sweethearts, her father’s family did not support their interracial union. In college, Jsanea wanted to create art she and others like her could identify with. 
“I realized a lot of the art that I indulge in and enjoy did not have black people, and I was like, ‘Why? Black women are so beautiful. Why is there not any of this art of black women?’” Jsanea said.
She said she hopes to celebrate “classically beautiful” black women through her work.
Inspired by the art nouveau movement and artist Gustav Klimt, Jsanea depicts women of color in her own pieces. 
“Good artists steal,” Jsanea said, taking a drag from her cigarette.
Along with using classic styles and artists for inspiration, Jsanea recreates animations and replaces the cast with black characters. On her Etsy site, PadlockLilyPrints, she sketched the sailor scouts from the animated TV show “Sailor Moon” as African-American women with hair styles such as box braids or blue, kinky curls. 
Jsanea also creates original animations. In her sketchbook lies a variety of characters representing different areas of the LGBTQ community. Gender fluid and polyamorous, the young artist finds enjoyment in creating comics that not only heterosexual people can relate to. 
Growing up in Plano, Texas, Jsanea said there was very little LGBTQ representation in the books she read or shows she watched. She read yaoi manga, Japanese fictional media focused on homosexual male romance, which was the closest form of queer media she could access.
“The struggle is so real in so many different facets. I mean, we [LGBTQ people] deal with prejudice, we deal with mental illness, we deal with people stereotyping us, we deal with people invading our privacy, we deal with people feeling like they have the right to chastise us for our lifestyles,” she said.
Jsanea struggled with society’s heteronormative ideals, questioning gender roles at a young age, her gender identity became more complex after a man raped her when she was 22 years old. 
“After I was raped, I could not stand the smell of my own sweat. I couldn’t stand other men looking at me. I couldn’t stand being in public places with men. I couldn’t stand even less being in private places with men, and I really felt like this was what femininity was — this fear, this constant sexualization,”
Jsanea said. 
No longer wanting anything to do with womanhood, she said the idea of masculinity sounded safer to her after she was raped. She felt as if being a woman meant she had a target on her back, so she identified as
transmasculine. 
Since then, she is learning to love her femininity again.
Her experience with gender taught her that everyone should be allowed to reevaluate their majors, genders and sexualities. 
“There’s something so sexy about being 100 percent you … whatever that means,” Jsanea said.