Fashion Editorial: Inside Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Renaissance-Style Paintings

British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is best known for her portraits of fictitious subjects painted in muted colors, often caught in unexpected moments of action or contemplation. Although her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the black figure, if you look carefully, the artist also pays particular attention to the style and attitudes which reverberate clearly with the codes of today’s fashion pictures.

As a black artist of Ghanaian descent, Yiadom-Boakye has said: “Race is something that I can completely manipulate or reinvent as I want to,” and notes that the material and historical aspects of paint as essential to her practice.