Toyin Odutola Quotations

I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.

I moved around a lot when I was a child; two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down.

The social media bit is really about documenting process. I like the dialogue if it's constructive, but I'm now at a crossroads. I've accumulated a lot of followers, and it's great, but I'm also at that teetering point where people are feeling themselves a little too much, commenting a little too much.

I'm really interested in independent publishers and memes and mini comics. But even before that, I was interested in Japanese manga and anime.

It's kind of a language I've developed over time that's basically breaking up the face into components and planes. Inside each plane, I draw gradation marks, and when planes come together, they form sinews, a hairlike weave that's like a landscape of the face.

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

For a while, I was nervous about portraying women because of the objectification that automatically comes with it, whether the artist intends or not.

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.

I needed to create something I could take with me wherever I went.

The graphic style itself is influenced by a lot of very layered and detailed comics that I read as a kid, like Vagabond by Takehiko Inoue.

When I was in school, I conceptually didn't want black people to have context, to take it out of all that history. I wanted nothing to indicate where they are or what time it is, to place them anywhere.

I dont think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual’s subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless.