British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints captivating oil paintings of Black people’s everyday experiences. These pieces help bridge connections and foster a sense of empathy between viewers of her artwork and the portrayed Black people. They highlight the importance of creating a more equitable and just society for every individual, regardless of race or ethnicity, reflecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities.
Yiadom-Boakye's portrayal of Black individuals doing everyday activities, devoid of stereotypes or clichés, celebrates the richness and diversity of everyday Black experiences.
Take for example her piece, To Improvise a Mountain which shows a young girl in a noticeable blue school uniform. The girl is facing away from the viewer, scratching her head. In front of her is a reclined woman, perhaps her mother, who’s looking at her with a questioning gaze.
This seems like an all too familiar scene where a parent interrogates a child for their mischief. Perhaps a teacher had been pranked, homework forgotten or a fight had broken out with another student. Either way, the work showcases how even such a mundane moment can be rendered poetic, beautiful and worthy of being captured and recreated.
Meanwhile in Yiadom-Boakye’s painting Condor and the Mole, the artist has captured a treasured fleeting beach day as painting. Two young girls are seen playing with something in the sand, giddy and content. This is a moment that anyone can relate to and would appreciate. Here, viewers can truly understand how poetic, multifaceted and worthy of admiration and respect Black lives are, much like the lives of someone from any other race and background.
Another thing that can be easily recognized in Condor and the Mole is how Yiadom-Boakye has rendered the girls’ faces abstract. This is something that she deliberately and frequently does to give her painting a universal quality. It allows Black viewers to easily see themselves within her paintings in the absence of recognizable-clearly rendered faces.
Yiadom-Boakye's paintings, like Hard Wet Epic, also deliberately presents a darker, almost nocturnal palette. She paints dark backgrounds to intentionally envelop her subjects in them, adding depth and complexity to her narratives. These darker backgrounds allow her to explore the interplay of light and shadow. This appears like an experiment with chiaroscuro, a Renaissance painting style characterized by sharp contrasts and shadows. As it was in the Renaissance, this style is done to portray enhanced emotions and infuse the canvas with a dramatic effect. Hard Wet Epic also employs her skillful use of color and composition to capture a mundane but joyful scene of three men walking together on the beach.
Yiadom-Boakye's pieces not only shatter stereotypes around the everyday experiences of Black people but also inspire future generations of Black artists to embrace their heritage and tell their own stories. Since as she proves, even mundane everyday events are poetic, precious and worthy of their own paintings.