4 Panel Canvas Art, Abstract Art, Abstract Oil Painting, Black and Red Canvas Painting, Group Painting, Huge Painting, Contemporary Wall Art
This artist is on a mission to reflect the power of his Black subjects
PORTLAND, Ore. — The paintings of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe can stop you in your tracks. The piercing eyes, the bold colors, and the sheer scale of his portraits convey pure power, which is all by design.
It’s very important that when you are painting a Black subject, that they look “powerful enough to motivate them to feel confidence in themselves, to feel proud of who they are,” Quaicoe said.
Quaicoe studied painting at Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana. While there, he was fascinated by classic portraits of the past.
“It all goes back to the old masters,” he said. Their paintings have always shown “very powerful people that have a certain status in life.” But he never saw Black people that were portrayed so majestically. Today, as a painter, his portraits are a way of correcting that.
“It’s my way of sort of rewriting history,” he said. “We also tell our own stories, how we want to be seen.”
In 2017, Quaicoe moved to Portland, Oregon, to be with his wife Jessica. He was painting nonstop but was having a hard time finding any place to show his work. He’d taken a job at FedEx to make ends meet. But then, in November 2019, he got a call from Amoako Boafo, an old friend from art school, and a fast-rising star in the painting world. Amoako invited Quaicoe to join him for a residency in Los Angeles. That residency led to a solo show at the prestigious Roberts Projects gallery in 2020 — a show that sold out before the doors even opened. “I was blown away,” Quaicoe said. “I wasn’t expecting people to love my work that much.”
The show was titled “Black Like Me,” reflecting Quaicoe’s experience moving to the U.S. “Once you get here, you are Black,” he said. “No one says, ‘Oh, look at that African,’ because nobody knows that I’m Ghanian, all they see is my black skin.”
His arrival in this country led him to create a show that spoke to the shared experience of Africans and African Americans.
His work often portrays friends he’s met in Portland, painted in a very American setting, but with some African elements brought into the scene. Some of his backgrounds show a heavy application of paint, a look that draws from mud houses in Ghana’s Northern Region where people build their own homes using thick mortar and clay applied by hand.
“Any time I get the opportunity to go there,” Quaicoe said, “I just rub my hands on the house, just to get the feeling of it.”
Success at his recent shows has given Quaicoe the space to just paint, creating new work for several upcoming high-profile shows. It’s also attracted media attention from the likes of Vanity Fair, Artnews and Art Forum, a fact that Quaicoe mostly tries to ignore.
“For me, it becomes a little bit distracting — you don’t want it to get in your head. Because it’s like, you are still a work in progress. That’s what I always consider myself. I always say that I’ve not done my best. But sometimes you have to enjoy the moment a little bit. Yeah, it’s nice.”
This report originally appeared on OPB’s “Oregon Art Beat.”
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Tone Your Canvas Black — And Sculpt
Many artists will tone a canvas before tackling subject matter. Few paint it black. Brian Buckrell explains why working on a black canvas has its advantages.
“At the Top,” by Brian Buckrell, 2012, oil, 8 x 10 in. The panel was toned with black and some dioxazine purple.
“One of the problems I had in learning to paint is the tendency to overdo things and move too far into representational painting,” says the artist from Vancouver, Canada. “This forces me to simplify. When you are working on black, you are already far away from what you are looking at.”
Brian Buckrell
Only about 20 percent of Buckrell’s plein air pieces start on panels toned black; the rest are toned with a dark red. The artist paints on MDF board or Masonite, and applies black gesso or red acrylic paint with a foam roller to give the surface some tooth. When working on black, he sometimes decides to put a bit of transparent color on part of the canvas, usually dioxazine purple, violet, or green, “just to give a bit of a direction of color to it,” he says. “It doesn’t take it away from a deep dark black, it just gives a tone to it.” Buckrell draws in the composition with a graphite pencil, which shows up well on the black paint. He paints thinly at first, favoring transparent pigments, and suggesting the midtones and highlights. “Lay them in alone and you have just targeted what you want, with the black serving to emphasize that,” Buckrell advises. Then he moves on to opaque lights on top. He works in either acrylic or oil paint, favoring acrylic for most pieces.
Buckrell started this piece by drawing the composition with a yellow china marker on a panel toned with black gesso.
Buckrell’s piece in the “spots of color” phase of painting
The finished 6″ x 6″ sketch
“For me, working on a dark canvas, it’s a spot-the-color exercise,” says Buckrell. “It’s about putting in a spot of color and putting another color next to it, trying to suggest a pattern that you want the viewer to see. For some reason or another, working on a dark value is more like sculpting. The forms emerge out of it. There’s a feel that I get that I don’t get from a light value tone.”
“Estuary Evening,” by Brian Buckrell, 2012, oil, 6 x 8 in. Done with a palette knife.
An acrylic piece in progress, painted over black gesso toned with dioxazine purple.
This approach certainly favors scenes that have a lot of dark areas in them. But even with well-lit scenes, a bit of black outlining elements or peeping through between objects creates an interesting sensation of depth. “The amount of black that is remaining at the end is sometimes a large part of the piece and sometimes a small part, as with any painting,” says Buckrell. “It’s a bit of an unknown at the start.”
“Left to Rot,” by Brian Buckrell, 2011, oil, 6 x 8 in.
Buckrell pauses and then speaks candidly. “It’s a serendipitous crapshoot, and you hope that it turns out all right.”
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