Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye from Time Out. 

Several Black women artists are also writers—meaning they delve into literary channels of thought: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc as another full-time creative outlet, another exceptional skill in a heavily packed arsenal.

In 1977, painter/writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born to Ghanaian parents that emigrated to London, UK. She attended Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London, England, Falmouth College in Cornwall, England, and Royal Academy of the Arts also in London, UK.

Accompanied by the Kindness, oil on canvas, 2012, photographed by Larry Qualls, Artstor.

Butter and Sugar, Sugar and Butter, oil on canvas, 2012, photographed by Larry Qualls, Artstor. 

With nods to the old masters in representational painting such as Monet, Degas, and Velazquez, Yiadom-Boakye’s large-scale, moody portraits of fictional, dark skinned characters are composites made from scrapbooks, mock ups, and her imagination. The figures defy the ways black bodies are depicted, defying racial stereotypes and gender roles. Men hold lush flowers and colorful birds whilst wearing dancer’s attire, showcasing a sensitivity that is not globally allotted to them. Women are graceful, provocative, and seeming always contemplative, deep in thought. Although the brooding, saturated backgrounds threaten to take over, swallow the rich complexions of these figures, she is able to clarify and formulate an otherworldly etherealness to their faces and bodies, using subtle light to separate the body and space. Her paintings are not just paintings filled with gloriously inventive blackness, she is a lover of paint and the moments only paint can deliver. Every brushstroke, every line has importance, a reason for being.

Any Number of Preoccupations, oil on canvas, 2010, photographed by Larry Qualls, Artstor.

As harrowing and mysterious as her paintings, her mythological short stories and poems (often in the back of her exhibition catalogues) are gritty horrors that analyze the depths of human psyche. For example “In the Very Nature,” Yiadom-Boakye uses personification— her lead characters are Jackdaw (an omen for death) and Carrion Crow (prophetic and also death messengers) who are perched outside of a swanky apartment party and decide to rob the place after a murder took place.

“He stares at the body. It has gone stiff.
‘Feeling pecking? Giving you an appetite is she?’ goads the Jackdaw.
‘No, not at all!’ mumbles the Carrion Crow, who is in fact rather curious as to the texture and flavour of the dead lady. As a scavenger, he never gets the first helping of a fresh kill. He is rather low down in the pecking order.
‘Go on, have a bite, I won’t tell anyone!’
The Carrion Crow hops over to the corpse and pecks feverishly at its doughy left palm....”

Elements contain a Grimm vibration, reminds one of Helen Oyeyemi stories. The way Black women utilize language is sharp, edgy with cleverness, humor, and horror brilliantly tied together.

Quiet Challenge, oil on canvas, 2012, photographed by Larry Qualls, Artstor. 

“The same thread of logic runs through my writing and painting. It’s something to do with having a particular way of thinking creatively. The things I can’t paint, I write, and the things I can’t write, I paint. There are many ways that I try to write but I don’t consider myself a very accomplished writer. [laughs] I really enjoy building characters and making them nuanced in a way that I am not sure the paintings are.”— Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to Antwaun Sargent in Interview Magazine, 2017.

1pm, Mason’s Yard, oil on canvas, 2014, Fine Art Connoisseur.

Yiadom-Boakye has exhibited all over the world. She is in the collections of the Studio Museum Harlem in New York City, New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D. C., the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, the Tate Modern in London, England, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw in Warsaw, Poland, and a host of other museums and private patrons. She has won the Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting, the Pinchuk Foundation for Future Generation Prize, the prestigious Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Currently, she resides in London.