Richard Mensah

London-based artist Richard Mensah paints in mediums including oil and acrylic with an intuitive approach to create paintings inspired by his African heritage, childhood memories, and everyday happenings.

Mensah often blends abstract and realism into his paintings, particularly through patterns and African textiles, in an effort to create a narrative in each work and capture emotion.

His style is mainly intuitive, conceiving an idea to paint, but often starting the painting before the idea is fully formed. He relies on his intuition to bring the concept into reality. This approach means very little preparation before commencing any painting.

He says, “I don’t always know how the pieces of ideas come together to fully bring the concept into reality.”

His key guiding principle for every painting project is, “With patience, every painting always ends well.” He is driven by the need to tell the African and Black peoples’ story from their own perspective which is often missing in the art world. His paintings attempt to draw audiences into the event or the story being told, thereby bringing it to life for the viewer. Occasionally, this is done by way of omitting details that the viewer has to fill in with their own visual imagination or experience, thus making the engagement with the painting participatory rather than passive.

Mensah’s work commonly presents his passions of social justice, human rights issues, and storytelling of the under-represented in society

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