Esi Edugyan

On Art, Race and the Future

Out of the Sun

Huiting

Under the painter's gaze, we dissolve into a kind of boundlessness. All of our attempts to assert our identity, through clothes, objects, expressions, get shattered. We are taken out of ourselves, become open to every outward interpretation - first by the painter, then by the viewer- until we become another being entirely. 

To look at a portrait is to be forced to build a human life out of our own inmaginations. That is what makes it a fundamentally hopeful act. Every portrait is a plea, at its heart, for empathy. When we sideline or hide awav images of certain people, what we are cutting ourselves off from is some sense of their possible history and daily lives, their humanity. The lingering fascination of art, its power, lies in our ability to make whole what is lost, through dreaming. A fixed image can be an entire life, a flowing story. We ask, who were they-or in the case of invented people, what were their possible lives? And in the answering, we wade back towards them, to their essential mystery, which is the same mystery we each of us are now living out, the morality of our choices, the worth of how we’ve spent our limited hours.

Out of the Sun quotes

Join the club