Nzinga: Figurative Painting

Nzinga: abstract figurative painting of a fierce African warrior queen, diplomat and military strategist

$250.00

About Nzinga

"Queen of Ndongo and Matamba. She refused the seat she was offered."

Njinga ruled in what is now Angola for more than thirty years, through a period when the Portuguese were taking her land and her people. She fought them, negotiated with them, outlasted a succession of their governors, and was still leading armies into her sixties. The story told most often about her is a small one, and it says everything. Received by a governor who had left her no chair, meaning her to stand while he sat, she neither stood nor walked out. She arranged a seat of her own and spoke to him at eye level.

This painting is not a history lesson. She looks straight out of the canvas, crowned in gold and beadwork, her hair moving like the water behind her, her collar opening around her like a set of wings. The marks on her face are hers, not decoration. Nothing about her is accidental, and she is waiting for you to say something first.

Nzinga is here for the thing she understood, that the terms you are handed are rarely the only terms available. Most of us take the seat we are given and call it good manners. Hang her where you will pass her on the days you feel small. She is there to remind you that there is more in you than the room is currently asking for.

An artwork from the "Trophy" collection

The people in this collection were painted for what they refused to accept. Some of them lived: a physician who tried to gather the whole of medicine into one book, a queen who would not take the seat she was offered. Others came from the artist's head: a machine that taught itself to build, a historian who travels through time, a detective, a gunslinger, a queen of the green world. She does not paint them the way history paints them. She takes what each one is known for, then asks what it looked like from the inside.

The message underneath every face is the same. There is more in you than you have been asked for. Each of them is given the ornament, the pattern and the colour usually saved for royalty, because the quality she is painting is not rare, it is only unused in most people. She hopes they are hung where they will be seen daily, and that they keep making the same quiet suggestion.