Gozi Egbuonu

Four years ago, one of my first instructors in painting told me, “If you find something you’re good at painting, you should paint it.” While some painters may interpret that information as limiting, I found it to be exactly what I needed to hear as I struggled for inspiration in my work. Prior to receiving this bit of advice, I had tried painting landscapes, animals, and even dabbled in abstract pieces, but it was not until I discovered my talent for oil-based portrait painting that I knew the direction in which to take my thesis. I was drawn to portraiture’s ability to capture and evoke emotion through the artist’s unique rendering of the human face. By the summer just before my senior year, I knew that I wanted to paint self-portraits in addition to renderings of my close family and friends and my decision to do so was further confirmed by my growing appreciation for the works of artists Elizabeth Peyton and Rebecca Westcott, who both used their friends and family as figures in their pieces. In addition to taking cues from other artists for my work, I borrowed Jenny Saville’s technique of painting from a photograph and began collecting images of me and my muses from our childhoods and early adulthoods.
During a semester abroad in Sydney, Australia, where I attended and studied painting at Sydney College of the Arts, I became fascinated with drips and splatters of color acrylic paint mixed with water on paper and canvas. I decided to incorporate the random dribbles of paint into the backgrounds of my portraits. At the time, I had no idea what their significance would be, but I knew that they would play a major part in the reasoning behind my decision to create these youthful portraits.
Nearing the end of fall term of my senior year at Washington and Lee, it became clear to me that youth represented a blank page on which to begin the story of my connections to each of the individuals chosen for a portrait. At the ages we were in the pictures used, none of us knew that life would somehow bring us together. In the case of Diane, Lisa, Sham-Wow, Anna-Banana, Dultz, Jessie, Ike, Mada, and Fada, I did not even know these individuals, and in the case of Mada and Fada, I had not even been born. As for the paintings of Trizzy, Chiz, Nneka, Nnamdi, and Johnny-T, I was aware of these people’s existence at the ages they are depicted in the work. Even so, I could never have known how each person would impact my life until much later. At the age in my self-portrait Moi, my mind may have attempted to see the future, but until that day came to pass, each experience, each moment, and each decision would play an important part in my development and the way in which I see the world, as well as my place in it. Each element of my work down to the canvas the image is painted on symbolizes the countless ways in which circumstance could have redirected our lives and changed them dramatically. As a result, the overarching theme of my work is one of intention and randomness and how the two fit together to create harmony. The only intentional decisions made in the work are the selection of the people to be painted, images used for the portrait, the visible charcoal lines used to outline both the face and the bust, the orientation of canvas to fit the face, and the color used for the background, while the randomness can be found in the backgrounds created and the varying sizes of the canvas. The intentionality and the arbitrariness intertwine to create a working image and a body of paintings that are cohesive, while retaining individuality. Ultimately, life is much like the paintings before you; there are intentional decisions and unintentional ones that, together, create a meaningful adventure.