“My main sources of inspiration have come firstly from paintings. I admire painters like Rembrandt. Caravaggio and Jean-Michel Basquiat are my favourites. I am attracted to Caravaggio’s use of light and mood in some of his paintings. His paintings are very dramatic and therefore I like to take influence from his work.”
The film is both about identity and race. From a black man getting out of prison to a black man living the white house as president, American society forces you to live with a double consciousness of being black in a country that oppresses people of color.
“We are being anesthetized by beauty, by the color of fabrics but behind all this, there is something else. The Silk Road is from where the most beautiful fabric originates. But it is also the origin of the imprisonment, the locking up of the planet”.
It would be a shame if the festival is discontinued before it has reached its potential, and before we can see the impact it can make. As for plein-air paintings, even the harshest of critics can succumb to that one nostalgic picture. Plein-air paintings call attention for the places they depict. They encourage a dialogue about the things that happen there. In an ideal world, the Lamu Painters Festival would work to create awareness about Lamu and to promote the preservation of a special place.
Good Hope is a feeble attempt by the Rijksmuseum to bring better understanding to the ‘relationship’ between South Africa and the Netherlands. While there is merit in bringing awareness to this narrative, what it fails to do is bring home the message of how the colonized continue to struggle to break free from the shackles of oppression and it excels at continuing to pacify the voices of these people, allowing the Dutch audience to continue living in oblivion or perhaps ignorance.