November 18, 2024 Issue

I’m suffering from chronic Trumpitis. I’m desperate for relief. Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct,” in this week’s issue, provides it. What a wonderful piece! It profiles British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, who is an extraordinary colorist. Mead writes, “Fadojutimi’s swirling images seem to capture a state of mind as much as they do a state of nature—they are always energetic, and sometimes ecstatic, blooming into color and motion and light.” Mead visits Fadojutimi in her London studio and is allowed to watch her paint:

Wearing gloves, Fadojutimi seized a dish of neon-pink paint in her left hand and a sponge in her right. She swept the color boldly across the canvas, then called for a bucket of water, into which she dipped two sponges, squeezing their contents over the paint she’d just applied, to create washes of color. With a round brush, she added punches of deep purple to the pink, then took up a flat brush, scraping all the pigment into a hard, tight arc before squeezing water on it again. She then seized a fine brush, applying busy patches of teal; climbing on a step stool, she added lines that clambered up the canvas.

Mead notes that “Fadojutimi often uses oil pastels and pigment sticks to push aside liquid paint on the canvas, creating wormy, convoluted lines that give the color an increased dimensionality.”

My favorite part of “Color Instinct” is the opening paragraph – a vivid description of Fadojutimi’s studio:

The studio of Jadé Fadojutimi, the British artist, is in a warehouse in South East London, with long skylights set into a corrugated-metal roof that reverberates loudly during the city’s frequent autumnal rains. At eight and a half thousand square feet, the space initially appears overwhelming, but at its center Fadojutimi, who is thirty-one, has created a small zone of intimacy. A pair of antique couches—one upholstered in emerald damask, the other in ruby—sit back-to-back, offering opposite vantage points on a dozen or so exuberantly colorful paintings propped against the walls. Some of the canvases are completed; others are works in progress. Vintage armchairs are positioned around a pair of coffee tables, each of which is strewn with the detritus of millennial life: iPads, rolling papers, bowls of fruit, vape pens, books, empty wine bottles, cooling mugs of herbal tea. Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint. Scores of potted plants encircle the seating area—spiky snake plants, opulent grasses, thick-leaved rubber plants—and a towering ficus tree filters the light from the skylights overhead.

That detail about the “plush panda bear ... its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.  

P.S. A special shout-out to Alice Mann for her sublime portrait of Fadojutimi in her studio. Definitely a candidate for best New Yorker photo of the year.

Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead's "Color Instinct"