Color versus Tonality

I tell my students often about tonal values and that colors lack them. Colors have no values, they show relations. Perhaps my painting ‘Roundism – 02-02-18‘ is the best recent example of that statement. Painting this black woman I want to show the world black is not a color to be found in skin hues. Black and white people do not exist and especially people from African descendance show a variety of different colors that show relations, such as cooler and warmer ones. I find this very comforting: no matter what color you show, it has no higher or lower value than another one. There are only relations between them. There are only relations between them.

Black Lives Matter

In this respect the Black Lives Matter movement, started in 2020, with all due respect is wrong. How emancipatory justified it may be it could better focus on all colors rather than calling people black, meaning there are people opposite to black, namely white. I understood in the Roman empire there was no racial classification like ‘blacks’, ‘negros’, etc. Just as there was no real word for ‘gay’. People were called dark-skinned or for example ‘chlorus’ (pale), the nickname of a Roman emperor.

Hope

I send out hope and the wish for discovering the true nature of skin colours like artists do. By the way, North European people, like I am, are not white but pink with lovely green shades. Ipse dixit! 

Click here to read about the sale of a print through icanvas.com

Oil on linen (60 x 80 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers

Sales info: info@corneakkers.com