Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: artist in search of the mystery figure

The British artist’s work is increasingly sought after, and this week marks her first major London show. But who are the people in her paintings?

Artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in her cramped studio in Hackney, London. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

When I ask if I might meet the young British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at her studio in Hackney, east London, the message comes back from the Serpentine Gallery, where she will shortly have a one-woman show, that this won’t be possible.

“There’s only one chair,” I’m told. “There’s nowhere to sit down.”

But I won’t give up. Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits resist easy definition; her subjects exist only in her imagination, and once on canvas might belong to any number of times and places. In interviews, moreover, she is ever reticent, as reluctant to explain her enigmatic titles (Citrine by the Ounce, The Courtesy of a Saint, The Cream and the Taste… they read to me like the index of a modish short story collection) as she is to describe her methodology. Her studio, then, seems like a solid thing in a floating world, and I am determined to see it.

And so it happens that one sunny weekday afternoon, I come to press the buzzer at what I take for an old garment factory, outside of which two men are loitering apparently without intent, mobiles in hand (“Are you Becca?” one of them yells, at no one in particular). This part of east London has changed beyond all recognition in recent years: I passed a branch of Aesop, purveyor of preposterously expensive hand creams and shower gels, on my way. But this nook is still recognisably gritty, marooned as it is between canal, railway line, and a quartet of looming Victorian gasometers. It smells of petrol, fried chicken, good hipster coffee and, under that arch over there, warm dustbins. I’m glad it’s spring. I wouldn’t want to be here at dusk on a winter night.

Yiadom-Boakye’s voice, soft and light, comes over the intercom. “Hello?” She sounds uncertain, as though she is not expecting me. Once I’m through the door, though, she is all smiles, her upturned mouth mirroring the cartoony circles of her magnificently huge black-framed glasses. The studio is small, and heaped with what looks to the outsider to be rubbish, great piles of it in every corner; in the middle is a small rectangle of space in which we stand awkwardly. She laughs. She has worked here for years. It just piles up.

What will she do when she eventually finds somewhere else? (She lives in south London, so the commute is not as easy as it might be.) Will she clear it out? Or will she just lock the door and leave everything behind? “I don’t know,” she says. “Perhaps.” She grabs my coat, which I’ve slung over the famously lonely chair: “Be careful. You’ll get paint on it.” Her overalls, I notice, are so splattered it’s almost silly: it’s as if she’s appearing in the role of “artist” in a stage play.

But then she picks up her bag – it’s by Mulberry, I think, and pristine – and suddenly everything seems, paradoxically, a bit more real. The bag perhaps tells its own story, one of hard work and success.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s A Passion Like No Other, 2012. Photograph: Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London

Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977, the daughter of two nurses who came to Britain from Ghana. After a foundation course at Central St Martins, she studied for her degree at Falmouth College of Art, and for her MA at the Royal Academy Schools. In her 20s she continued to paint, but she also held down a variety of jobs, including one testing mobiles in a phone-recycling plant (“a job to drive anyone insane,” as she puts it).

It wasn’t until 2006, when she won an Arts Foundation award for painting, that she was able to work as an artist full time, and it wasn’t until 2013, when she was shortlisted for the Turner prize, that she arrived in the public consciousness – though even now she isn’t what you’d call well known (her show at the Serpentine Gallery will come as an introduction to many).

All the same, there’s no doubting that her reputation is growing. Sought after by collectors, her portraits are in several public galleries, the Tate and the V&A among them, and now they are to fill the Serpentine. How did she feel when she got the email? “I thought: oh no.” She laughs. “No, it’s great, of course. But it’s terrifying, too. It’s a strange thing to say, but I’ve never dreamt of certain kinds of exposure. You want attention for your work, but you don’t necessarily want it for yourself. It’s so public. It’s like walking down the street with no clothes on. You can’t help but get nervous.”

Yiadom-Boakye’s work stands out, but quietly so, at a polite angle from just about everything else.

First of all, she is a painter, and a figurative one at that, at a time when contemporary art remains bewilderingly in thrall to installations, to film and conceptual work. For another, she paints mostly – though not exclusively – black faces while working, broadly speaking, in a European tradition that has always favoured white skin. Not that either of these things are much up for discussion. “I keep saying it,” she tells me, when we finally sit down together in a cafe along the road. “It [painting black faces] just seemed normal to me. It wasn’t my intention to put black faces back in the picture.

It wasn’t political like that at all.” What about painting? Has it been hard to stay true to it down the years? Did she feel, starting out, ludicrously unfashionable, as if she was wearing tweed when everyone else was in combats? “I didn’t think about it. I suppose I didn’t feel like I was working against the tide. People were talking about paint in dismissive ways [at art school], but I thought they were making a silly argument. It’s like everything else: there is good painting, and there is bad painting. At college, I tried everything. I think I just enjoyed painting the most. The other things didn’t work for me particularly.”

Among her influences are Manet, Degas (she often paints people who are dancing) and Sickert. “I wasn’t intimidated by those painters. It made it easier: there was so much I could look at, and learn from.”

When did she realise she wanted to be an artist? “I never made a decision about it. I didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t think a career in art was possible, so I always had a plan B. I’ve always been resourceful, I’ve always worked, I was always ready to retrain if necessary. My parents are nurses. We’re pragmatic people.” What did they say when she told them she wanted to go to art school?

“They were realistic. That’s why they’re wonderful. I would have been worried if they’d said: ‘Brilliant, you’re going to be an artist.’ But they didn’t. They said: ‘That’s fine, but what’s your backup?’ They were neither jumping up and down, nor angry, which was exactly what I needed. Because, back then, you couldn’t necessarily see any of this working out.”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010. Photograph: Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London

She didn’t enjoy her time at St Martin’s, and the experience convinced her she would have to leave London to do her degree. “So I went to Falmouth, where I was able to think, and I loved it. At Falmouth, they had a deal whereby you could get your work photographed for free if you applied to do an MA, so I decided to go ahead with that. It cost £30 to apply to the Royal College of Art, and £20 each for the Slade and the Royal Academy, so I went for the two cheaper ones; I couldn’t afford to apply to all three. I didn’t know I’d get in, but it turned out to be the best thing when I did. My fees were taken care of, and the tuition at the RA was really good.” She sounds amazed at her good fortune, even now. “Jesus, I’ve been lucky. But there was never a moment when I felt sorted. I still don’t. I’m ready to do what I need to get by.”

She paints quickly, completing the bulk of each canvas in a single day, something she attributes both to her impatience, and to the fact that she finds it more difficult to return to work when it has begun to dry. She doesn’t use models. The people in her paintings are composites, their faces made up from “different sources” (in her studio, I spotted a scrapbook fat with pictures from magazines). “I worked with models when I was training,” she says. “But that was to do with getting things right, with figuring things out. The thing is that if you use a model, the painting becomes about capturing that particular person, and it’s disappointing if you can’t.

“I once tried to paint a friend, an incredible character, and it just wasn’t him. So moving away from that was to do with freedom.” Does she give her characters a back story? “No.” But what about her titles? They seem so careful, so deliberate.

How much should we take them into account? “Well, they never relate to a specific narrative that would make sense to anyone else. The logic is entirely mine. I wouldn’t discount them. I would think of them as an extension of the work, another mark, but not as an explanation. I love Miles Davis. He puts titles to things, even though his music is instrumental. You see the title, and you feel it in the sound of the music.”

Together, we look at some reproductions of pictures that are to appear at the Serpentine (the show will comprise old work, much of it from private collections in the US, where she has shown more often, and some new pieces, too). A Passion Like No Other (2012) is of a boy in a navy ruff, his stare unfathomable. Any Number of Preoccupations (2010) stars a man in white slippers and a voluminous red robe, a half-smile playing on his face. Citrine By the Ounce (2014) is a man, his gaze cast down, in a white sweater – or is it a vestment? – set against a plane of bright yellow.

Together, they illustrate a recurring motif in Yiadom-Boakye’s work, which is that her characters seem not really to inhabit their clothes; often, it’s as if they’re wearing fancy dress.

What is this about? (Any Number of Preoccupations looks like a firm nod in the direction of Sargent’s Dr Pozzi at Home, but the others only seem to me to make reference to a certain sense of displacement.) “I don’t know,” she says. “Long things: robes, dresses… it’s all quite ambiguous. The expressions are important. That’s what takes the longest to work out, getting those to work the way they should. In the last few years, I’ve become obsessed with colour, too.

My pictures used to be very dark, but now I’m putting in vivid reds and greens.” No objects, though. In fact, no context at all. Her characters might as well be on the moon for all that we know of their whereabouts; nor is their social class or relative wealth so much as hinted at. Does this have to do with issues of visibility/invisibility? She isn’t saying, but her approach seems to me to be unavoidably political. These are half-people – “suggestions of people” as she once put it – and that’s why her paintings are, in their own quiet way, troubling. Outwardly jaunty, they ask us, I think, to consider how we view others.

I wonder how she sees her career in the future, and how she will deal with the pressures of the art world, which is at permanent fever pitch just now, an incessant festival of vulgarity and capriciousness, as she becomes better known. “Well, I don’t think ahead,” she says. “After all, I might not be here tomorrow. I might be run down by someone with a beard and a bicycle [we’ve been moaning, over our hot chocolate, about the local hipsters]. But with the art world, you just have to switch off. If you want to be pressured, you will be. I don’t. I’m lucky to have had galleries who are very supportive, and if I don’t want to do something, I just say no, and it has got easier to do that.

And I’ve never had money, so I don’t care about it.” She tells me quietly that she has no interest in becoming an art world personality – a Tracey Emin, or a Grayson Perry – and I believe her, not least because I can sense (it takes one to know one) that she is already itching to get back to work.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2 from Tuesday until 13 September

Source: Theguardian.com

By: Rachel Cooke

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