"I saw Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's exhibition Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain just before and just after the pandemic. I think I went six times. There are forms of art that are really close to godliness. When I look at Lynette's paintings, I feel like their spirits have come from somewhere, because it's such a pure form of imagination. When I was making my film I would flip through a book of her paintings every single morning before I went to set."
"Much of my film is set at night, with a predominantly black cast. When I think of her painting The Stygian Silk [2019], which is of a young black boy against a kind of inky-black background and surrounded by black dogs, all those things are totally clear. What's beautiful about that work is that there's a sort of light within the boy's face. It's not illuminated by anything and yet it is illuminated."
Nadia Latif visited Lynette Yiadom‑Boakye's Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain multiple times around the pandemic and used the paintings as a creative touchstone. The paintings shaped Latif's visual approach to her debut feature, The Man in My Basement, influencing choices in colour, perspective, gaze, and point of view. Latif consulted a book of the paintings each morning on set and gifted the Tate exhibition catalogue to the cast before filming. Much of the film is set at night with a predominantly Black cast, and specific works such as The Stygian Silk informed ideas about inky darkness and an inner, un-sourced illumination.
Read at AnOther
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]