Today's blog post will be meeting our founders. We mentioned a little bit about their history in the previous post but we will be going a little more in-depth in this post. You will get a chance to learn a little more about their individual artistic practices.
Alanis Forde | Akilah Watts | Anna Gibson
Alanis Forde
Alanis Forde is a contemporary Barbadian artist who specializes in expressionistic realism portraiture. She works mainly with oil paint and collage.
Forde attended the Barbados Community College and just completed her Bachelors in Fine art. She’s been in a number of group exhibitions at the annual Crop Over Fine Art Show (at the Grande Salle Central Bank of Barbados), Punch Creative Arena, The Crane Gallery, frame and art co. and a few other spaces. Forde has been featured on the Barbados Today online news paper and the Easy magazine.
In the 5 years she’s been creating, her concepts are based primarily on the black female identity in an idealized ‘exotic’ Caribbean space. She is now exploring the geographical space she's in and what it means to live in a paradise.
Alanis has just completed her first residency at the Punch In Creative Arena in Barbados and is currently working towards building up her portfolio.
Akilah Watts
Akilah Watts is a contemporary Barbadian artist who works with many media including drawing, painting, and mixed media. Watts graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor's Degree in Studio Art and went on the participate in Prizm Art Fair in December of that same year.
Watts has exhibited locally (Barbados) in several group exhibitions as well as internationally in Miami and Romania. She has also been featured in a few local publications such as the Easy magazine, Barbados Today, and the Exporter magazine. And in March 2019, Akilah exhibited in her first-ever solo exhibition at the Frame & Art Co.
Watts’ current work focuses on black hair and the relationship she has with her Caribbean roots through the creation of her painted backgrounds which display some Caribbean fruits, vegetables, baked goods, snacks, and plant life that she would have grown up seeing. Her series entitled Beautifully Braided is Watts’ way of exploring ideas of the exotic or paradise in her island of Barbados.
Anna Gibson
Anna Gibson is a Barbadian contemporary artist who explores multiple mediums, crafting images of body manipulation through realism and expressionism. She has been practicing for over 5 years completing her Associates and Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts (2017).
Her artwork centers around exploring and exposing vulnerabilities women have about their differences to each other, and how they seek to physically mask or morph their bodies, to achieve acceptance within their cultural, racial, and social environment.
The most recent artworks are crafted around the evaluation and comparison stage of your physical image. Each angle taking advantage of the mind and body’s, vulnerable disposition, while emphasizing these self-inflicted processes of metamorphosis, using harsh and soft combinations of drawing/ painting, and exaggerated shapes and forms of “abnormality”.
Comments