Happy Hump Day POU!
Kenturah Davis is a contemporary artist working between Los Angeles, New Haven and Accra, Ghana.
Davis paints pictures with her words, making emphatic marks by applying oil paint with stamp letters. Her portraits encourage the viewer to contemplate the power of language because each line is imbued with a deeper meaning; form becomes intertwined with content. “I kept a notebook with my own writing and some quotes from other texts; occasionally, I’d do a small sketch,” Davis said of her decision to include words in her paintings. “On one particular page, my writing overlapped with a portrait that I sketched, and I realized that the quality of the written line was no different than the quality of a drawing line, except with the written line, we’ve assigned meaning to a sequence of marks made on the page.”
“Every mark had meaning and affirmed or embodied something relevant to the person in the image,” Davis continued, describing how she chooses the words in her paintings. “Over the years, I’ve chosen different kinds of text that exemplify ways that we put language to use.”
Davis earned her BA from Occidental College and a MFA from Yale University School of Art