No Paintbrush

Description

I paint Black people green. Original works on paper — figures and still lifes. Oil pastel and oil stick. Signed, shipped from Paris. | Alexandre Desane — Paris Painter. Oil pastel and oil stick on paper. At six years old, I told my mother I wasn't Black — I was orange. Not because I was ashamed. Because I couldn't see myself in the word they were using against me. That question never left. As a painter, I answered it with green. Green because Black people are never actually black — they carry every shade of brown, copper, and ochre that the word flattens. Green because Piccolo, the wisest figure in Dragon Ball Z, is green — an outsider who becomes a master, whose severed arm grows back. Green because when the Belgian king cut off the hands of Congolese people as a demonstration of colonial power, that act demands an answer

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