Osaze Akil Stigler on skin, storytelling and the freedom to paint.
Brown is rarely just brown. Look closely at skin and one color becomes many. Red can sit beneath the surface while purple appears in shadow. Gold comes forward in light and blue can exist where we might not expect it. For Brooklyn-based artist Osaze Akil Stigler, these colors are not simply used to recreate the world around him but to build a world of colors imagined. “Whenever I start a painting, I create a story around the figure in my mind,” Stigler says. “Once I understand something about who the figure is and the world they inhabit, a face usually comes to me.” What emerges is not a fixed shade of Blackness, but a world imagined through color. Across Stigler’s paintings, skin moves through deep browns, reds and purples. Realism is not always the point. “If I paint skin red, purple, or in a hue we might consider ‘unrealistic,’ within the world of the painting it is real because we’ve made it real.” The rest of that world follows. Hair shines. Clothing and trim help to build character. Buildings rise around the body. Light changes the skin. Stigler sees his figures as different inhabitants of the same universe, connected by an invisible thread. That thread is Blackness. Not Blackness as one color or one way of looking. His figures hold softness, power, beauty and strangeness. As Stigler puts it, they exist “fully and expansively, on their own terms.” This freedom with color also pushes against a history of Black people being reduced to a single image. Stigler points to caricature and the exaggeration of Black features. “There is nothing inherently degrading about pitch-black skin or full lips,” he says. “The violence was in reducing an entire people to a caricature.” His paintings work to move in the opposite direction. Instead of narrowing Blackness, he opens it up. “There are reds, blues, purples, golds, and so many other colors moving through it,” Stigler says. “There isn’t one formula for brown.” Perhaps that is where the theory of skin tone begins. Not in…