Sikelela Owens is a an emgerging London Painter who uses the canvas to depict her her figurative everyday. By "figurative everyday" I am alluding to the idea of her everyday "figures", assuming them as family, friends and relatives. Working closely with the transfer of photography, her photos are more than just a mere transfer of medium, from lens to paint. Rather, her paintings push past representation, to brown body landscapes, situated within common places like the lounge, the park and the bedroom.
I am interested in her use of colour. Seeing brown bodies represented ina canvas, was a rarity. However, through the emegernce of brown painters comign into the art scene, representions of more familiar faces, skin, photgraphic perspectives, gestures have caught my attention. A feeling of comfort, in this different sitution to my everyday yet somehow familiar is strongly felt through her bespoke painterly technique. A soft, light, airated, maternal and naive feeling gestures that hold figures in embrace within the painting, "Blue Blanket" instaneously takes me to a different time. A time when I was younger, naive, and boldly smiled at the camera.
Im interested in her use of paint that describes her family/ friends, and yet its softness that I mistaken for "naiveity" boldly gestures away realistic representations of her people. I wonder if these clouded faces, familiar yet so distant, are part of the nature fo the painting. That is, the ambiguity it provides for the veiwer. The spectator. The voyeur. Is this ananomynity a state Owen feels inheritently responsible for?
As someone who works similarly, responding to photographs of my childhood, and archival type images of my life- my only tapestry. I am constantly in question of my authorithy to depict my family and friends. They are all I have, all I know and it seems blatantly obvious to be painting from my experience with and of them. But there is always a nudging pull to "check myself". To keep them safe, to protect their visage from the public, the unknown. I am trying to find the balance between sharing my experiences and yet protecting them. As they are indeed most of what makes me, me.
Blue Blanket, is an intimate feild of happy faces wrapped in blankets ona couch. A familiar and benile observation that is elevated within the canvas. In relevance to my own practice, I think back to my idea around the canvas acting as a tapestry, a contemporary tapestry. Where the benile, the vernacular, the ordinary, seemingly small experinces/ moments can be depicted and thus transformed. These "small things" (like blue blanket's benile potrayal) that are experienced are part of a larger umbrella of unassuming politics that affect our everyday.
Comments