Lynette Yiadom-Boakye famous quotes

When people ask about the aspect of race in the work, they are looking for very simple or easy answers. Part of it is when you think other people are so different than yourself, you imagine that their thoughts aren't the same. When I think about thought, I think about how much there is that is common.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#Simple #Thinking #People

People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#People #Black #Painting

Painting from life was incredibly important for me because it allowed me to train my eyes to see everything that is there. But I realized early on that painting from life wasn't something that I was all that invested in. I was always more interested in the painting than I was the people. For me, removing that as a compulsion offered me a lot more freedom to actually paint and think about color, form, movement, and light.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#Eye #Thinking #People

I always say the work is not a celebration as such, because that's sometimes just as weird and excluding and perverse.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#Celebration #Sometimes

The timelessness is completely important. It's partly about removing things that would become in some way nostalgic. There aren't really any markers of time, like furniture or a particular style of shoe that denote a particular period or place. I think that's why I like the outdoors, because it removes a sense of time and I want the painting to feel timeless, because it increases that sense of omnipotence.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#Thinking #Style #Important

It's hard to pin down what the politics would be, in a way. For me the politics are very visual and felt, thought, seen, but not necessarily put into words. The confusions and conditions within the work are the politics. The fact that a lot of the time the first thing people want to talk to me about is the racial angle, which is a part of the work and I am happy to talk about it, but it's not necessarily the first thing on my mind when I am making something.
-- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

#Confusion #People #Mind

The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter.

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, and loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, and people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea, and work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, and play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, and the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice, and people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.

A simple yet profound way to create a healthy body, a stress-free mind, and a peaceful sense of well-being.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

It must be a balance in everything we do, not too much of everything, keep it simple, not complicated.

Made with Pencils is grounded in the creativity of a few, propelled by the financial support of many, and most importantly, it's empowering generations to come. A simple idea, a heartfelt desire, and a world of possibility. A pencil, a promise, and a dream.

Before one can walk as Christ walked, and talk as He talked, he must first begin to think as Christ thought.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...

Often we want people to pray for us and help us, but we always defeat our object when we look too much to them and lean upon them. The true secret of union is for both to look upon God, and in the act of looking past themselves to Him they are unconsciously united.