Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.
Video: Paint & Pitchfork
In a documentary by Christine Turner, the painters behind the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, share their thoughts on the portrayal of Black bodies on canvas:
Painting is about light.
It’s about the way that we choose to cast light
on one thing, or to allow that to rest in darkness.
By casting light on certain things,
I choose to say yes to those stories.
And I think that allows me
as a painter to participate in the world around me
but also to contribute to the broader evolution of culture.
.
To read the story behind the film, click here.
Running time: 9 minutes
Email subscribers may click on the title of this post to watch the film.
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
What a most fabulous, important, moving, motivating video — I watched it twice just to TRY to really internalize that last sentence by Amy Sherald when asked if she would ever paint white people. He reply — so true, so tragic, so fabulously strongly and so calmly expressed: “You recognize the absence of yourself (a white person in her art) but you don’t recognize the absence of me (in the history of centuries of portraiture in art ).” How she says it just made my heart sink — This video should be shown in every art class everywhere!
LikeLike
I love this short video, a perfect portrait of two important artists.
>
LikeLike