BY ILLUMINATING AN ANCIENT ART FORM AN ARTIST SHOWS US OUR INNER LIGHT
Artist D. Lammie-Hanson wants to showcase Black ‘glow up,’ highlighting that our beauty comes from within. To do this the self-taught artist has mastered the 15th-century craft of silverpoint, a fine line drawing technique that preceded ink and pencil. The artist plies the technique she learned in 2017 to ‘illuminate’ the soul of her subjects, marrying the luminescence of metal, light and shadow with acrylic paint.
Her silverpoint is done on black, and much like Kerry James Marshall, she searches out the blackest paint for her canvases. She says the extreme matte black acrylic represents Black skin. Conversely she etches brass metalwork onto indigo canvases accented with vibrant colors like yellow and red.
The widely exhibited artist is currently an artist-in-resident at Little Black Pearl in Chicago. There she has produced her largest metal point piece called “Dared to Be Shining and Black”. At eight feet by 12 feet Lammie-Hanson says it is the world’s largest silverpoint. It is a recreation of the Harlem native’s childhood block featuring her parents and siblings in a neighborhood tableau. Like Archibald Motley she captures the complexities of black, urban America in her street scene. It was unveiled at the Chicago Art Department in January 2023.
Lammie Hanson has exhibited nationally and internationally with this new medium at Art Basel Miami, GW Carver Interpretive Museum & Wiregrass Museum of Art, both in Alabama; Arts Council of New Orleans, the New Orleans African American Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
Meet the artist and view her work with Pigment International at the 57th Street Art Fair June 2 & 3.
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