![]() ![]() In the case of Nigeria specifically, what does that hybrid space mean to you? How do you capture that visually? Plus, I can spend three full days online trying to find one particular image, before the moment when I say, “Ha! I know this!” I look for those that showcase a hybrid space, and not just Nigeria-there are many such spaces, most obviously formerly colonized places. Or from friends’ Facebook pages, or family albums and popular album covers. Every time I go back to Nigeria I buy pictures from the photographer who shoots our family’s events-even if he thinks they’re not good. They come from magazine ads, fashion and lifestyle pictures. ![]() The found photographs, transferred onto the canvas, are common in your work, and prevalent throughout both panels here. I was a little bit scared, so doing it as a diptych was a way to give myself courage: What if one panel had the figure and one did not, so I didn’t feel like I was diving into the deep end? Here, I wanted to bring as much rigor to the space as to the figure. Up to that point, in paintings where the figure was very dominant, I wasn’t paying as much attention to the space. I wanted to paint an interior with no one in it. His was a very warm red, whereas I decided to use a cool pigment called quinacridone red.Īnd how did the painting come to be a diptych? This would be a challenge to myself: a painting dominated by one color. Its rich red palette, with lots of cadmium, was highly controlled, and I remember having that moment when you see something you want to use. Visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I saw a small Degas painting. In some ways the inspiration here was more about form than content. To start with formal questions, what led to the decisions to make this painting a diptych and to use such a distinctive palette for it? Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors, detail (2013). African viewers may be able to immediately decode the images, while they may require some elucidation for the average Western observer. They contain images of popular Nigerian musicians and beauty queens, ads from fashion magazines, and photographs from family events to situate themes relating to tradition and newness, politics and culture, and urban and rural in buzzing tension. Her contemplative paintings are also the subject of two new solo museum exhibitions, at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York.Īkunyili Crosby’s paintings of herself, her family, and friends, often relaxing or embracing in their homes and other private spaces, explore cultural hybridity through a welter of references. You can come and take a look at my diptychs and other new works at the Omega Printmakers Exhibition and Emsworth Artists show both at the end of August.Already on a dramatic career rise in the six years since Njideka Akunyili Crosby earned her MFA from Yale, the Nigerian-American painter shot into the cultural stratosphere on Tuesday when she was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow. Pronunciation: dip-tick Summer Exhibitions Two boards, most commonly wood, but also bone or metal, were hinged together, the inner faces covered with a layer of wax which could be inscribed. The word diptych comes from the greek root ‘dis’, meaning two, and ‘ptykhe’, meaning ‘fold’, and was the name of the folding writing tablets used in Roman times. Often you’ll see portraits of a couple with one person in each panel. It is sometimes a continuous but divided image, or may be composed of separate, closely related images. The format of the pictures may be landscape or portrat, but they will usually be the same size. Very simply, a diptych is a drawing or painting in two parts. And by putting two plates next to each other I’m creating diptychs twice that size. So from a typical printed image size of 30 cm x 30 cm or 30 cm x 40 cm, I’m now able to print 40cm x 60 cm. This is particularly useful when creating some of the large diptychs. It helps me stand back from the image and create longer more sweeping marks. After a few unsuccessful attempts and with advice from my tutor and fellow printmakers, I have found that laying my printing plates on the floor and standing over them to apply the ink with larger rollers seems to be working. But then I discovered I needed to adapt my technique – to scale up. After a lot of experimentation with new papers ( Somerset), ways of handling larger sheets and the maximum area possible to print, I’ve found a solution. The challenge with printmaking is that the size of image is limited by the size of the printing press. People keep asking me to make my pictures bigger.
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