2/28/2020: While looking for International Women’s Day artists, I first spotted these gorgeous, powerful paintings, and I thought Yes! This! When I realized they were painted by a gentle giant of a man, and I thought Yes! This! (But not for International Women’s Day…) While he may not the fierce black woman I expected him to be, his heart is certainly in the right place. A portion of the proceeds from each of Okamura’s prints is donated to Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), a Title IX Brooklyn-based youth development organization. 

“[T]he further I went down this path of painting women as my subjects, the deeper the stories got and the more feedback I received. The most important thing I realized were the questions of painting people who have been under-represented in the history of art, the history of portraiture. I soon became part of a small movement of people who were looking to correct that. Sometimes it doesn’t always line up as the viewer imagined. That part of my work I didn’t intend to be conceptual, but it has challenged people’s ideas of who can represent who through art. People can quickly sense if artwork is from a place of authenticity or not – my messages are positive and so are my representations and this is a celebration of my community.“

– Tim Okamura

The multi-racial Canadian artist’s work is meant to explore the human relationship to identity. Okamura uses a surprising combination of materials to achieve his gorgeous paintings – applying collage, spray paints, and other mixed media to create his subjects. I think his unusual materials combined with the scale of his paintings make them extra impactful and memorable.

You can see all of Tim Okamura’s magnificent paintings on Instagram, and you can buy his prints on Artsy.