Lynette Yiadom Boakye is an acclaimed British artist of Ghanaian descent. The Guardian describes her as ‘one of life’s great manipulators when it comes to paint’. She surely knows how to manipulate the eye. Her paintings look like days worth of work. Funnily enough, she doesn’t like her work looking too laboured. She works at a prolific rate with one painting a day. If the painting is not working, she destroys it and moves on.
Her paintings are fictional with black subjects as she feels that it is normal to paint black subjects since she is black.
When the issue of colour comes up, I think it would be a lot stranger if they were white; after all, I was raised by black people […] for me this sense of a kind of normality isn’t necessarily celebratory, it’s more a general idea of normality. This is a political gesture for me. We’re used to looking at portraits of white people in painting.
In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist she talks of how she does not have a strong personal connection with Ghana and they connection she has is through her parents. I thought somehow her heritage was a reflection of her work is not a reflection of culture, but of her imagination and normalcy.
Boakye paints beyond the four sides of the canvas by painting open narratives with no underlying storyline.
SOURCE: CHRIS SAUNDERS, WIKIPEDIA, SAATCHI, THE GUARDIAN, KALEIDOSCOPE, FRIEZE & T MAGAZINE
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