Thick Black Hair

A face emerges from a curtain of dark hair, its skin rendered in twisting ridges of brown, blue, and black that catch the light like braided cords. This is the work of Amoako Boafo, a painter born in Accra, Ghana, in 1984, who famously sets his brushes aside and uses his fingers to move the paint. Dragging pigment across the surface with his hands, he creates those rope-like swirls that make the face feel alive and constantly shifting. The one soft note of color, a pair of bright pink lips, sits right at the heart of the picture and draws your gaze in.

Placing his subject against a pale, empty background is a deliberate choice for Boafo, one that gives the figure room to command the space and feel utterly present. His paintings celebrate Black skin and Black identity with both boldness and warmth, and this portrait carries a hint of closeness, as though the person is drifting toward you. Boafo picked up some of his expressive edge while studying in Vienna, where he grew to admire the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. That influence, mixed with his own hands-on technique, has helped make him one of the more closely watched painters working today.