Mixed feelings 4 by Oluwafemi Akanmu
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Charcoal and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 18 x 24 in
Year: 2025
Price: $1200.00 USD
Status: available
Mixed Feelings” is a visual series that captures the emotional complexity of Black womanhood strength, softness, pride, visibility and invisibility. Each portrait in this series holds the gaze of its subject with quiet defiance, inviting the viewer to pause, reflect, and feel. In a world that often demands emotional clarity or neat narratives, Mixed Feelings celebrates complexity. It affirms that contradiction is not confusion but depth. That beauty, identity, and emotion can coexist in layered, unapologetic form.
Why collect this work?
Severe frontality and compressed patterning make this portrait visually emphatic while leaving the sitter’s emotional state unresolved.
- Akanmu states that his practice affirms the dignity of Black identity. Here, that intention is pursued through a direct gaze and composed pose, without reducing the sitter to a simple emblem of strength.
- In the photograph, the tightly cropped head and shoulders fill the canvas. Reflective eyes and closed lips hold the face still, while looping background shapes and white garment markings crowd its edges, intensifying the figure’s reserve.
- The documented charcoal and acrylic support a structural contrast: dark tonal modelling gives the face volume, while opaque, sharply bounded marks flatten the clothing and background into graphic fields.
- Catalogued within the “Mixed Feelings” series, this work matters as a case study in representing Black womanhood through sustained ambiguity rather than a neatly legible emotion.
About the Artist
Oluwafemi Akanmu
Oluwafemi Akanmu is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Ibadan, NG.
Nationality: Nigerian
Through my art, I intentionally highlight the richness of African culture and its enduring beauty, with particular emphasis on the dignity and...
