Tambourine

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter of Ghanaian descent whose trademark style of portrait painting is shaped by European painters like Édouard Manet (1832-83) and Francisco Goya (1746-1828), but with a focus on Black subjects. Her figures are not portraits of real people, but products of her imagination that have an otherworldly quality. Like a fiction writer, she creates characters with complex personalities, but unlike an author she does not place them in a specific time or setting. They are frequently painted in nondescript clothing, in a dark palette on a monochromatic background. The artist describes her style as “one-shot painting”, meaning that she tries to start and finish each work on the same day.