Artist Statement

Abstract

Artist Statement Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (bio) I give all I can, as I think seduction is very important. I love painting. I love the surface of it. I know how it makes me feel when I see certain works or when I’m in the presence of works that I really admire, and I think the pleasure for the viewer comes out of the kind of feeling, rather than me trying to tell a story. It’s a sensual thing—it’s about a sense of touch and a sensibility. I want it to be that kind of experience as well, which is why I don’t like the idea of giving too much of a story and trying to control that response too much. I think it’s always in some way political. But for me the political is as much in the making of it, in the painting of it, in the fact of doing it, rather than anything very specific about race or even about celebration. I don’t see what I do as at all celebratory, because to me it just is. The fact that they are all black is double edged as well. They’re all black, or what I should say is they are all tinted black or brown—some of them actually have black features, others have completely Caucasian features—but they are still sort of black. For me, that is the normalizing aspect. It’s not normal, because they’re not real people, but at the same time that means also that race is something that I can completely manipulate, or reinvent, or use as I want to. Also, they’re all black because, in my view, if I was painting white people that would be very strange, because I’m not white. This seems to make more sense in terms of a sense of normality. I suppose with anyone doing anything you set yourself certain parameters, it’s not about making a rainbow celebration of all of us being different. It’s never seemed necessary to alter the color of people just for the sake of making that point. [Her parents] live here in London, and they have for forty years. But just the fact of them having raised me the way that they did, they are my connection with it [Ghana], in that I haven’t been there that much and I certainly never lived there. I wasn’t born there—I was born here, and I was raised here. Really my connection is through my relatives, the people who raised me, and their way of thinking, which to me is very much Ghanaian, and that has obviously effected how I think and what I think about. But it would be disingenuous of me to claim some strong connection with Ghana as a place because I don’t really know it and I wasn’t raised there. The way I always put it is that Ghana is present as a way of seeing, which has influenced me. from an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kaleidoscope 15 (2012) [End Page 904] Click for larger view View full resolution Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Flex (2011) Oil on canvas (15 ¾” x 13 ¾”) Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Corvi-Mora, London © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Click for larger view View full resolution Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Passion Like No Other (2012) Oil on canvas (31 ½” x 29 ⁵/₈”) Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Corvi-Mora, London © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye [End Page 905] Click for larger view View full resolution Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Switcher (2013) Oil on canvas (59” x 55”) Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Corvi-Mora, London © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Click for larger view View full resolution Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Give (2003) Oil on canvas (24” x 17”) Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, Peter von Kant, and Corvi-Mora, London © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye [End Page 906] Lynette Yiadom-Boakye LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE, whose Ghanaian parents migrated from West Africa to England, is a native of London, where she was born in 1977 and still lives. She is currently known for her large-scale figurative paintings...