Creating art as a form of visual journaling - a form that took easily to her penchant for pens, markers, and acrylics - is how Whitney Chinonye Ernest hopes to preserve culture and human achievement. She sees art as one...
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Creating art as a form of visual journaling - a form that took easily to her penchant for pens, markers, and acrylics - is how Whitney Chinonye Ernest hopes to preserve culture and human achievement. She sees art as one of the purest forms of preservation, an attempt to archive the greatest stories and achievements on the continent. This soon extended to an attempt to capture the larger world around her on canvas, keeping them in the conversation long after she's gone.
An autodidact at heart, she has developed her own personal style and iconography through repeated experimentation, practice, and study of the greats. Nigerian by birth, raised in Ghana, and having tasted bits of Kenya, Mauritius, South Africa, Togo, Benin, has exposed her to the colourful depth of African expression. It is this submersion in African culture that inspires her use of bright colours, manifested by acrylic or markers.
Her goal is to extend the archival of her own emotions and experiences, to the larger African community and its wealth of history. Her creative process, in homage to how she first began, begins with observation and understanding because history can only be reliably captured when it is first understood. She hopes to continue archiving the continent, a piece at a time.