Dearest friend of my youth,
I ’ve wrestled with, and then worried about, the form this piece should take for some time now, for days and weeks, really, because on some level I wanted to write to you out of the same kind of immediacy, not to say intimacy, that Lynette’s images engender in me, and to get at that immediacy—the feeling of one voice addressing another—I finally settled on the epistolary form, just as Lynette’s paintings can be viewed as letters sent from that currently under-explored land we might as well call the imagination, letters and thoughts from the depths of Lynette’s imagination and strong hand, depicting figures sometimes standing still and sometimes sitting upright in landscapes, terrains, and fields of color that are germane to Lynette’s style, a style that, before you know it, floods your mind with her characters, let’s call them that, who inhabit scenes where “nothing” happens but the experience of being, and then there you are again, standing a bit away from the canvas, looking further at what Lynette has wrought, in, say, green unused areas—areas not filled with a vase or bed or person; patches of color that are “just” color—and just as suddenly, it seems, there is the green of your mind planting ideas and feelings about what Lynette has described without words but using a different kind of language, a language of brush and scale and colors the world has known before but not seen.
Looking at Lynette’s exceptional new work in London recently, at the Corvi-Mora gallery in a show titled A Mind for Moonlight, I was with you, my friend, even though you weren’t physically there, because I knew at once that you would exult in what Lynette has described as her lack of interest in and refusal to paint victims, an ethos that contributes to these new works painted on linen that breathes. As I stood in that gallery, with the pearly gray London light edging its way in, my vision, my mind, was transmogrified by the experience of looking, the intimate exchange between the thing seen, observed, and the thing itself. But I didn’t know how to write to you about that moment, and how the world in Lynette’s characters’ heads filled my mind and made a world, too. What language could I use to describe what I saw at Corvi-Mora that afternoon. The eyes that illuminated the world inside a subject’s head, and then mine? This is an age-old problem that language never helps solve, ever, the problem of conveying in one medium what it means to experience another. Because, essentially, those moments that change us, the long and short glances as we take in paint, for example, or a photograph, or words that become paragraphs and paragraphs that become thoughts and then a story, are inexpressible moments that we convince ourselves we can express through language, but that’s just a trick of the mind, a kind of guise. By the guise of language I mean our propensity to adopt a role, a particular tone, when we talk about those paintings, those photographs, those words that moved us in the first place. I suppose one could call that tone authoritative, for want of a better word, but I would be a completely unreliable narrator if I started to imitate here or anywhere, really, the language I learned in academia, or learned to imitate while a college student in the 1980s, when the goal was to be Rosalind Krauss, or Barthes, or someone other than yourself, certainly in terms of voice, a time when fracture—forced humanism—was essential in conveying the life of the text or the death of the author, I could never determine which as I read those various texts, an admixture of the personal and knowingness, resulting in an unimpeachable intellectual and thus moral rectitude that wasn’t so far removed from all those men Krauss, Barthes, and others had studied with to begin with, guys who didn’t deal in the equivocal, saying painting was thus, a sculpture meant this, writing could be only that. What interests me here, writing about this today, with the memory of those Lynettes in London, is the failure of language, my language specifically, and how that failure marks the return of a kind of pleasure that was wrapped up in you, once, long ago, when we sat on hills, on green wet grass telling each other the story of color. The failure of language—my language—began in Harlem when I first saw Lynette’s work. That was in 2010. Even then, I thought I would write to you indirectly, that is, in the voice of a critic, an academic wandering the halls of his own intellection, losing more and more contact with the feeling the images engendered, but I stopped myself then and I stop myself now, dearest friend of my youth, because that was not my voice, nor the voice Lynette’s paintings engendered in me, work that would fill your mind with interest, too, and I thought of you when I first saw them, that would be in 2010, years ago now, when the world had yet to experience, at least consciously, what it’s gotten itself into now, years before the British-born Lynette and my American self had ever considered let alone known that once again Empire would be linked to the Americas because of the madness of certain men, men who were born of this planet but who are not of it, smashing against the idea of humane behavior let alone intellection, treating them when they consider them at all as tiresome anachronisms, much more interesting to catalog and push out and define difference, catalog it and box it up on ships filled with the dispossessed swimming with hope in small crafts that invariably smash on the rocks in sight of liberty. I look at Lynette’s recent paintings now, in light of life’s current atrocities, and I can’t help but see in the spaces of these canvases, executed recently, a different kind of space, an isolation that goes inward more, and connects with others less, and this might not be what she intended at all but that is the artist’s job: to give us something of their intention while not minding the beautiful intangibility and concrete need to connect that we bring to the work, a need and intangibility that are part of the experience of looking and that are not unlike the love we thread throughout letters, hoping to be heard.
When I first saw Lynette’s work, I thought of you, and even though I hadn’t seen you in a number of years by then—this was in 2010, as I have said—that experience was filled with you, and the stories you used to tell me about color, and how color has been used. Such a pleasant memory: us on the green, our backs turned to the fray below—mothers struggling sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily with their tired after-school children, messengers on frantic errands, office workers killing minutes, hours with a smoke or Diet Coke—as we talked about color sitting in our color: various strokes of brown and red that looked as realistic as the colored men in Lynette’s paintings where blackness is not a solid, as it is, for instance, in Kerry James Marshall’s paintings, but a color that changes with the light, with perception, as it does in life. We had two books, dear to us both, and for different reasons: Goethe’s Theory of Colours, first published in English in 1840, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, written 110 years later. What interested us: men of genius without color on their body writing about color, and what did they make of that? Each of them taught us a way for color to be a freeing agent, not a prison. For Goethe, black was not a color, he didn’t know everything, while Wittgenstein proposed certain things we loved to contemplate, jokes to play on the eyes, and how the eyes preconceive before looking. Wittgenstein asked, for instance, What if all traffic lights were brown? What if there was a tribe of color-blind people, how would we teach them what color was? For Wittgenstein, color was a story, and a way of unlearning what we thought we knew, such as racism having a color. To wit:
We speak of a “black mirror.” But where it mirrors, it darkens, of course, but it doesn’t look black, and that which is seen in it does not appear “dirty” but “deep.”
The dirtiness of black, of brown. A common assumption, one that is not above being rubbed out, killed, thought of as wrong. Indeed, we have heard of college students being arrested for reading while black. We have heard of a young man in Detroit being arrested for trying to garden while black. Colors can make for incomprehension, or sense, or violence. Wittgenstein could have been in North Carolina or Memphis or Staten Island looking at colored bodies when he wrote: “There is no such thing as phenomenology, but there are indeed phenomenological problems.” The problem of color; it comes back to us again and again. As a young man, the writer James Baldwin was mentored by the painter Beauford Delaney, with whom he had a profound experience: turning black from dirty to deep right before his very eyes. Baldwin wrote:
Beauford and I would walk together through the streets of New York City…. the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see… What I saw, first of all, was a brown leaf on black asphalt, oil moving like mercury in the black water of the gutter, grass pushing itself up through a crevice in the sidewalk. And because I was seeing it with Beauford, because Beauford caused me to see it, the very colors underwent a most disturbing and salutary change. The brown leaf on the black asphalt, for example—what colors were these, really?… And though black had been described to me as the absence of light, it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the color, black: the light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like that grass pushing upward through the cement.
Looking at Lynette’s paintings was like looking at that grass and that blackness struggling upward, and every stroke and positioning of her subjects resembled line after line of consciousness, lines of consciousness that stuck to my brow like letters in a letter, like stuck snow that melts and becomes another substance altogether, one that helps to grow the mind in a different way, like something watered, something beautiful, like a flower, Lynette’s flowers.
And it’s funny, my lovely, long-lost friend, to write Dear and Love to you as a greeting or a salutation respectively, because we never used terms of endearment as a kind of show; they were in our hearts, always, but since we are far away from each other now, we must rely on form—distance drives us to these things—so let’s just say Dear and Love for now as a way of shaping this letter you are in every line of, and as a way of giving a shape to a form that Virginia Woolf used so brilliantly in various ways, none more spectacularly than in her 1938 book-length letter about war, Three Guineas. But, of course, in my rush to share Lynette’s work with you, I see, now, that I’ve neglected one of the basic tenets of letter writing, certainly in a public space, which is to tell the audience who you are. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes:
In the first place let us draw what all letter-writers instinctively draw, a sketch of the person to whom the letter is addressed. Without someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless.
Virginia was no stranger to drama, but in this case I don’t mind her slight hyperbole, or really disagree with her adjective-heavy belief that what we recall in a letter implicitly is a portrait of the recipient too. If that’s the case, think of this letter as a kind of self-portrait addressed to two recipients: you, a friend of my youth, and the artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. While much separates you from each other—you are a photographer and male and American, for starters—what unites you is much stronger than any of the superficial categories we are supposed to define one another by. What you share is a fierce commitment to invention culled out of the real, or the imagination fortified by the exigencies of truth, the discipline it takes to give dreams form, just as letters give forms to longing and observation.
A few facts: You were raised in Europe, and Lynette is a Londoner. She was born there in 1977. Her parents are from Ghana, and in the UK they worked as nurses for the National Health Service. In a 2015 interview, Lynette describes her parents as practical, “That’s why they’re wonderful.” Every child wants to know and feel that the world their parents make for them is secure and reliable, and one can feel this steadiness in Lynette’s work: What’s more important than the world your parents make for you and that you then make for yourself?
An inveterate reader as a child, Lynette did not consider becoming a visual artist until her final year of high school; her first year of college was at Central Saint Martins, where she completed a foundation course, before finishing her undergraduate studies at Falmouth School of Art, in Cornwall, an experience that, says Lynette, gave her “the space to think” outside of London’s busy artistic hub. In 2003, Lynette was awarded an MFA from the Royal Academy Schools, and it was during that time that the painter began to hone her style and ethos. For the most part she wanted to create a universe where black people could live in the everyday without being considered symbols of pain, suffering, or triumph, but, rather, as human beings subject to the exigencies of life. To that end, Lynette stripped her work of complicated narratives in favor of what the body could and did express in stillness, or in action, while simultaneously expressing the artist’s deep interest in and commitment to color and form as they make up the world of the canvas. In short, Lynette is not blind to the question let alone to the reality of identity. And yet Lynette has done something profound with her work vis-à-vis the whole notion of categorizing—of bodies being “known” because of biography—by usurping the whole notion of portraiture, or the traditional notion of portraiture, wherein the artist marries an existing, preferably known face to the artist’s sensibility. Instead, in her work, Lynette marries her sensibility—her love of color, for one—to bodies that wouldn’t exist without her. The backstory in her imagined portraits is Lynette’s mind, and what the paintings reveal about her mind.
But back to 2010. By then, I had not seen you, dear friend of my youth, for a number of years. Great sadnesses plagued you: one sadness being your inability to connect your work with a larger audience, and a sadness about love, and a sadness, too, about the ways in which the world treated your colored male self in all its difference that never felt different to me, or to you: you were always yourself to me, lovesick for love. It was 2010, a soft late winter afternoon, when I first saw Lynette’s pictures. This was at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Curated by Naomi Beckwith, the exhibition was titled Any Number of Preoccupations, and the paintings preoccupied me at once, and rendered me silent, and were redolent of so many things, including Goethe’s remarks on color. As a writer and an artist, Goethe was given to the fact of a thing and its interpretive value; a leaf was a leaf, and one’s relationship to that leaf falling, falling to the ground, was of supreme interest: What did our minds see and our eyes invent when that foliage changed your perception of your inner life, and your hazy grasp of the so-called real world? Goethe’s treatise on natural phenomena is worth having a look at, certainly, but his 1797 poem, also called “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” reminds me of what the mind looks like, looking at Lynette:
Thou art confused, my beloved, at, seeing the thousandfold union
Shown in this flowery troop, over the garden dispers’d;
any a name dost thou hear assign’d; one after another
Falls on thy list’ning ear, with a barbarian sound.
None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;
Therefore, a mystical law is by the chorus proclaim’d;
Yes, a sacred enigma! Oh, dearest friend, could I only
Happily teach thee the word, which may the mystery solve!
Closely observe how the plant, by little and little progressing…
Looking at Lynette’s paintings that afternoon in Harlem was a kind of progression. Any Number of Preoccupations was Lynette’s first museum show in the US. (Two years before, she’d had a piece in the historic Flow exhibition curated by the museum’s former associate curator Christine Kim.) In the Beckwith show, there were twenty-four paintings on view, ranging in size, ranging in the number of people the artist filled the canvas with, a range of colors and shapes that lifted me up spiritually while flooding me with giddiness in the way that pure, unadulterated joy can fill the body and make it something else, a receptacle of joy that wants to spill out into the world with its happy news without proclaiming itself just as Lynette does not proclaim herself—her autobiography—so directly in the paintings, which are metaphors about being in the way that actors are metaphors for real people. Despite the gorgeous flourishes in Lynette’s work, there is restraint. Her people hold back, and peek out from the self-protective distance, saying: This is me, and then there’s you, but how much of you do you share with me, a painting? Shall we call this interest in restraint part of her British character, or is it more a depiction of what the great Flannery O’Connor said when she observed, “The uneducated Southern Negro is not the clown he is made out to be. He’s a man of very elaborate manners and great formality which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy,” or is the elegance of holding back one sees in Lynette’s work part of a particular ethos, one described by Marianne Moore when she wrote, “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint”—an ethos that affects the British artists Lynette now influences, ranging from painters to fashion designers like Grace Wales Bonner.
Dear friend, I thought of you, and our laughing together out of unrestrained joy and relief, when I saw Lynette’s paintings for the first time, because here, in Lynette’s paintings, was something we had longed for, talked about, and rarely seen: a distinctly colored world not defined by the standard narrative of the long gone guy, and the put-upon woman; a world, in fact, in which colored-ness was “just” a statement of fact, along with the rooms, mauves, reds, blues, spatial considerations, and so on, that made the painting. The release I felt looking at Lynette’s work that afternoon—and on subsequent days and weeks and now years—can best be characterized as being released from race as a neurosis in art, an infirmity so insidious that one doesn’t realize that one is reacting out of its various impulses—guilt, social responsibility, an earnest desire to understand more about the “other”—until it’s too late, and you’ve seen nothing at all, not the painting or book or poem under review, because all you’ve been privy to or trained to see is your liberal imagination, that which takes a long view close-up of the so-called colored problem that is, after all, one narrative, right? The colored problem has a body, and lives in so much despair. He or she or they grew up haunted by its ghetto past, and is prone to violence, not love.
I remember once talking to a woman I’ve known for a long time, and we were discussing something as harmless as school lunches—she was complaining about her daughter complaining about the food that was offered in her private school—and I said, “I don’t remember having school lunches.” And the woman—you don’t need to know her race; in any case, it’s fun, sometimes, to guess—the woman said, “That’s because you were deprived.” Of course, what I meant—what I knew, and remembered with love—was the fact that my mother always sent me to school with my own lunch. She didn’t think school lunches were particularly nourishing, and by filling a brown paper bag with her food, my mother was offering me the discipline of care: she was thinking about me as she sliced the bread and wrapped the fruit, and I was thinking about her as I tore into the brown paper bag at noon, happy for her smell, and the taste of her care. But the woman I was talking to didn’t consider that narrative, or even imagine it was possible. Her liberal thinking had colored her mind in ways that precluded love. I was black and poor and therefore deprived. The story of love was not part of that. My story aside, there was another story, or various stories, that I saw in Lynette’s paintings at the Studio Museum that long-ago afternoon; the work was love staring me in the face; it was blackness not shaped by trauma or resistance to the general complications that come with being human, no one was maimed by their race, a misshaping that the world, let alone the world of culture, has always associated with depth; it was the history of Western painting made into Lynette’s painting, which confused a number of critics who put their liberal imagination before seeing, and who certainly didn’t see what I saw that long-ago afternoon at the Studio Museum in Harlem: a woman of color making a world out of what the world had given her. In a review of the Studio Museum in Harlem show, Karen Rosenberg wrote:
The man in the red robe looks familiar. It takes a minute to place some of the details—ah, yes, that louche cover-up, cocked elbow and rakish eye belong to Sargent’s Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi. But this stranger doesn’t have a beard, and he sits rather than stands. At some point—it’s hard to say exactly when—you realize that he is also black.
Huh. Shall we describe Rosenberg’s claim as a kind of critical trauma, the weirdness that infects the liberal imagination when one feels one’s liberalism—one’s education—under attack because artists like Lynette defy certain expectations that are germane to connoisseurship, and because she manages to do this by jettisoning the very notion of what significance means to you: her bodies are not significant to others in the world, most likely, but they are significant to her and thus to the viewer, in the way black maleness was important to Toni Morrison, who said that when she was coming up she was confused and not a little annoyed by titles like Invisible Man and Nobody Knows My Name: she knew those guys’ names, they weren’t invisible to her. And that’s what I felt, dear friend of my youth, looking at those figures in Harlem: that Lynette had seen joy in guys like you and put the joy forward through the skein of her imagination.
I didn’t think about Whistler the first time I saw Lynette’s painting, but of course she loves Whistler, and of course there’s Cézanne, too, but isn’t every artist the product of an amazing amount of alchemy and isn’t the development of their vision through those various influences part of the job? To discipline what they see and feel and make it theirs? Why should Europe be any less of an influence than Africa, or more specifically why should the African seen in European art be any less of an influence on black female sensibility? Does Europe own red—the red these figures were, a color one associates with the blood of conquest, of richness, Charlemagne in his red boots—does red belong to Europe more than it belongs to Lynette?
Just recently I was in London and I met a curator who talked to me about Cézanne, and a painting I didn’t know very well, or remember very well: Cézanne’s Le Nègre Scipion from 1867. In it, a young man sits with his back to the painter, his right arm tensed as it holds up a great deal of the young man’s now weary strength. His form leans against another shape—an oval shape—thus calling attention to the length of his body, his arm, and the tension that exists between a fixed object (the oval or wall of the painting, so to speak) and that which can change in an instant: the human body. I’m sending you this image, dear friend of my youth, for a number of reasons, the primary one being to show (again) what we’ve always known: how the body’s distortions become a kind of fashion, and whether you’re looking at Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval, or other pieces, distortion of spiritual form, of that black body’s intent, occurs because Cézanne, Manet, and others put race before the art, thinking that’s all they needed, that that different color made a canvas. In the process, they left out what Lynette put back: the human. No one is just skin. Every one of us is a story written in blood standing between this world and the next.
Lynette’s paintings also drove a wedge between the black past and the human present. Her painting is a radical turning away from the ideology found in the precepts laid down during the Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1965 by Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the movement was established in reaction to Malcolm X’s assassination. The bloody years. Martin, Medgar, Malcolm. And now the bloody years. Grenfell, Charleston, Lexington, Virginia. Back in the day, Baraka wanted to help create a cultural world that promoted revolution, and that told black stories to black audiences, a universe of blackness. During those years, I remember going to the East, a black cultural center in Brooklyn, with my older sister. I was a child. There, we heard music and watched plays, looked at paintings, and heard readings. And what struck me, aside from all the youthful enthusiasm in that rickety, beautiful building, was how much time was spent talking about white people. If they weren’t so important to us, why did they take up so much of our time. Why was whiteness treated as the dominant power, if not the only power? So many artists of color are still there. They believe their work is a form of resistance, but what they’re really showing, playing into, articulating, is how important whiteness is to them. And it’s a power that the liberal imagination recognizes as such. In his brilliant essay “Within the Context of No-Context,” George W. S. Trow writes:
The Decline of Adulthood: During the nineteen-sixties, a young black man in a university class described the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century as “belonging” to the white students in the room, and not to him. This idea was seized on by white members of the class. They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt. They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress. It was thought at the time that reactions of this type had to do with “white guilt” or “white masochism.” No. No. It was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it, and they insisted on rejecting it and rejecting it and rejecting it, so that they might continue to feel the power of that connection.
In Lynette’s work, the power of the connection is with you and the figures in the work and you and you again. There is spiritual uplift and glorious ordinariness. Her figures’ skin is the most natural fancy dress in the world, on a par with these words, written by the Caribbean American author Jamaica Kincaid in her short story “Blackness”:
The blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it. The blackness fills up a small room, a large field, an island, my own being…. The blackness cannot be separated from me but often I can stand outside of it. The blackness is not the air, though I breathe it. The blackness is not the earth, though I drink and eat it…. The blackness is not my blood, though it flows through my veins… In the blackness my voice is silent. First, then, I have been my individual self… then I am swallowed up in the blackness so that I am one with it…
What Lynette showed me is what our friendship has shown me, dear friend, despite your being away, I send her images to your mind, I know through love that you receive them: that even in separation, in not being the subject of her painting, we are all one with it because of the joy to be found in our actual or metaphorical blackness, that which we wear—as members of the same life dance with beloved friends we no longer get to see—a dance that goes round and round and round.
Your friend,
Hilton
