Creative Workshop - Introduction to figurative painting

About

Explore and discuss the work on display in the National Portrait Gallery's current exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure. Learn from Bono, an artist who centres the authentic representation of women of colour in her work, also taking reference and inspiration from works on display by painter Amy Sherald. 

A specialist in realistic portraiture created by using staged photographs, Sherald’s work often depicts African American sitters in everyday settings, but Sherald uses grey skins tones to challenge conventions about skin colour and race. 

Bono will provide technical tuition, explaining how to create a portrait that captures personality and individual biography, providing insight into her own artistic process as well. 

All materials will be provided. Suitable for all abilities, including those new to painting.

About:

Shannon Bono (b.1995, London) received her MA in Art & Science from Central Saint Martins University and her Associate Fellowship in higher education from the University of the Arts London.

Shannon’s paintings embody an afrofemcentrist consciousness, sharing muted narratives and projecting the Black women’s lived experience through her own lens. She is invested in producing layered, figurative, compositions embedded with symbolism that centralise black womanhood as a source of knowledge and understanding.

Enamoured by African spiritually, Christian iconography and renaissance art, she employs its purpose of cultural impact for an improved society within her works. Shannon explores the internal body as well as the external, by merging the design of notable fabrics from Africa with biological structures, chemical processes and more recently the unseen world displaying divination for the foundations of her story telling. Bono uses the anatomy as a second canvas in the foreground, she views the body as a powerful signifier that provokes dialogue, playing with pose, gesture and the gaze to challenge reality.