Dodd Brown makes beauty from what remains...
Dodd Brown Makes Beauty From What Remains By Udemma Chukwuma There is a moment, standing before a painting by Dodd Brown Nkpa, when the eye stops trying to resolve the figure into something familiar and instead begins to read it the way one reads a piece of cloth, for pattern, seam, and texture rather than likeness. This is no accident. Nkpa, a Nigerian mixed-media artist born in Jos and raised in Port Harcourt, has developed a visual language in which the human body is less a subject to be faithfully depicted than a surface to be constructed, stitched together, quite literally in places, from paint, pastel, and discarded Ankara fabric. His interest, as he puts it, lies in “the possibilities that exist beyond conventional materials.” Working across painting and mixed media, Nkpa moves between oil, pastel, acrylic, textile collage and other reclaimed materials. His figures recall aspects of Picasso’s fragmented Cubism and Yusuf Grillo’s structural approach to the Nigerian figure. A...
