Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer, and one of the most prominent contemporary female painters. She’s best known for her enigmatic portraits, and an incredible body of distinctive work that draws inspiration from the old masters. But her subjects are not real people. She creates them from her own imagination and from found images. What’s more, Yiadom-Boakye is the first black British woman to have a solo show at Tate Britain.

In a review for the Guardian, Jonathan Jones writes:

“Yiadom-Boakye paints black people, and in the most hallowed of traditional European art forms: oil painting on canvas…

It’s like you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in the 18th-century galleries,” he says. “Except the black people who only play servile, secondary roles in those portraits now occupy the foreground and the high spiritual plane once reserved for white faces in art.”

Familiar, yet mysterious, Yiadom-Boakye’s work invites the viewer to project their own narrative. And it raises important questions of representation and identity.

Female Painters at the Tate

While she joins the ranks of prominent female painters, Yiadom-Boakye is also a poet and writer of prose. Her Tate catalogue features her written work alongside her visual art. As she has explained:

“I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.”

Her 2021 solo exhibition, Fly in the League of Night, at the Tate Britain, was interrupted by lockdown, but the Tate held an interview with the artist via Zoom.

I was interested to hear about her practice. She’s the same age as me, and I also paint people who appear in my imagination. My figures, too, are representative and symbolic rather than “from life.”

Here are some of the highlights from the talk…

Timeless paintings with a universal meaning

Yiadom-Boakye’s work is created in instinctive bursts, and couples with poetic titles. Her figures exist outside a specific time or place.

“I never wanted it to be pinned down to a particular time. I think the timelessness is important, because there's a universality to that. Sometimes, when things suggest a particular time, it becomes concerned with that. I don't feel concerned with that. I don't want to be concerned with that, because I think what I'm talking about transcends time. It's everlasting. There is no end to this era.

Describing her practice

“I think very early on my training as an artist I suppose was very classical in the sense of learning to draw from life, spending a lot of time in the life room, working from whatever was in front of me — whether that was an object or a figure. But always with this attempt to translate reality onto a piece of paper or a canvas, and in the sense of always trying to think about what was there.”
“The figure for me was always the thing that was most engaging. It was always a thing that I kept coming back to. But over time I got less interested in specific people or portraiture, or even thinking about it as portraiture. I haven't thought about my work as portraiture for a long time for this reason. The figure became something more like a vehicle. It became a way of thinking about painting and thinking it through. And the freedom it allowed me, as soon as I let go of the idea of trying to depict people I knew, or trying to get focused on getting a specific likeness… As soon as I lost that, there was all this freedom that a body could be anything. A person could be anything. A figure could mean anything. There was a kind of infinite possibility. And so, in that sense there was an element of pragmatism. I made the decision to distance myself from reality, not in the interests of being enigmatic, but more because of the level of freedom it allowed me. And I think the freedom it allows in looking and feeling.”

“It was very important to me that things felt “elsewhere.” That things feel somehow “floating above.” But that I keep going back this idea of the infinite possibility of a person, of a people, and I just found that incredibly liberating.”

What Art Critic, Okwui Enwezor, said about Lynette’s work

“Since Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits do not depict historically existing figures, but rather allegorically constructed subjects, her work seriously poses the question, ‘is a realist painting possible in the absence of realism?’ This is the crux of Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly project. She affects a realist style in the process of complicating realism's relationship to veracity.”

Yiadom-Boakye explains her process

“I suppose the language of my logic, the language of my thinking, has always been poetry. In a sense for me, that's always been the truth that I work through when I’m painting. So as much as there's a type of veracity, in there, there's a veracity of heart, there's a there's a truth of heart, there's a truth of feeling and a, strength of feeling and a truth of passion. There's also always a very strong sense that I'm in my own way of working. My thought processes have more in common with poetry and the making of poetry.”

On her use of colour and the colour of her subjects

“The two really have become the same for me, because as I'm painting, and as I look at people as a way of trying to understand how colour is constructed, or how a person is constructed, and you see how the how the clothing they're wearing is operating against their skin, is operating against the chair next to them, is operating against whatever's behind them, is working with their hair or with their jewellery, or an object they're holding… So, it just becomes it becomes a series of relationships. And you come to understand that when, even when one thing is about one colour… it's a very different conversation to when these things become intermingled, and you start to have relationships between those things.”

“But it took me a long time to realise that about what I was doing. And how I wanted to think about colour in every sense, going forward."

Watch the Tate Talk:

Focus on Female Painters - Lynette Yiadom-Boake Artist Bio

Born in London of Ghanaian parents, Yiadom-Boakye attended Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design before moving to Falmouth University,where she was awarded her undergraduate degree in 2000. She then completed a Master’s at the Royal Academy Schools.

In 2010, her work was recognised by New York and Munich-based curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, Okwui Enwezor. Enwezor, who was ranked in the 2014 ArtReview list as one of the most powerful people of the art world, gave her an exhibition at Studio Museum in Harlem.

In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and in 2018, was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize.

If you enjoyed this blog, why not head over and read more in my Focus on Female Artists blog series where you can learn more about contemporary female painters.

Contemporary Female Painters - Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Tate Talk