# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BjfPA31hwvd
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16045857-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/5687f92280.jpg
- **Posted:** 2018-06-01T16:02:41.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction. 
Lynette Yiadom Boakye (b. 1977) is a British painter who creates fictional character studies of black women and men. She pictures her subjects dancing, lounging or dreaming in front of backdrops of vibrant color. In the absence of a specific context, these people appear almost otherworldly, their humanity a phenomenon of the paint. Seated in front of a warm orange-yellow,a barefoot man, posed in profile, holds a blue bird up to his gaze. Before a wash of cool green, a pair of women in brighter green cardigans, their arms linked, pirouette into each other’s eyes. Perhaps in acknowledgement of their inherent fiction, the subjects of Boakye’s paintings often appear clothed in the garb of performers - dancers, actors, and athletes. Whether in making eye contact with the viewer or self-consciously looking away, they tend to seem aware of being seen. 
Boakye’s talent for evoking psychological complexity may owe in part to her experience as a writer as well as a painter. She has reflected, “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.” Boakye graduated from Fairmouth University and earned her MA from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. In 2013 Boakye was awarded a Turner Prize, a prestigious honor awarded by the Tate Museum for British visual artists. Last year, Boakye’s paintings were the subject of a New Museum Show, “Undersong for a Cipher.”
#LynetteYiadomBoakye LynetteYiadomBoakye
Photo: by Anton Corbijn for Vogue, April 2017

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## Tags

artistinaction, lynetteyiadomboakye

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