Jeremiah Foxwell learned to combine visual creativity and precision as a U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician deployed to Iraq, being able to creatively visualize what was hiding in plain sight wasn’t a preference — it was survival. That same unflinching attention to what is real and what is at stake has never left him. It simply found a new medium.

In 2018, a rare inflammatory condition had begun attacking his optic nerves, flooding his vision with doubling, ghosting, and unexpected color. For a man who had built his life on exactness — in the Navy, in corporate security, as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in D.C.'s Ward 6 — it was a confrontation with everything he had relied upon.

He responded the only way he knew how: he moved toward it.

Painting became, at first, a kind of emergency. Foxwell put brush to canvas not to create something beautiful, but to stabilize something broken — to map the fractured visual world his mind was struggling to decode. Those early works were raw, abstract, and honest in ways that formal training rarely produces.

Over the years that followed, as his vision slowly — partially — stabilized, his art transformed alongside him. What began as rehabilitation became a fully realized practice rooted in the city he has called home since 2009.

Today, Foxwell's work is unmistakably, unapologetically Washington, D.C. Working in acrylics, oil pastels, watercolors, markers, and spray paint, his canvases capture the H Street corridor, the ghost routes of old streetcar lines, the quiet dignity of row homes, and the tender, complicated reality of a city always in motion. He paints the sunrise over J.O. Wilson Elementary with the same gravity he brings to a tent home beneath an underpass. To Foxwell, both deserve to be seen.

His work has been exhibited at the DC Arts and Humanities headquarters and holds a permanent place in the collection of the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. In 2025, he was named a D.C. Art Fellow. He regularly donates work to J.O. Wilson Elementary and supports Street Sense, an organization serving Washington's unhoused community — the very neighbors who appear in his paintings not as subjects to be pitied, but as people whose lives carry weight and beauty.

The double vision that once threatened to take sight from him entirely has become the defining quality of his artistic voice. He does not see D.C. through a single frame. He sees it in layers — and he insists that you do, too.

The world may blur. It may shift. It may become difficult to navigate. But if you look closely enough, the character and soul of what matters remain clear.