While famous for his realist depictions, Wyeth's compositions often carry a sense of the uncanny, which led some critics to call him a Magic Realist. Wyeth rendered scenes of his everyday life in rural Pennsylvania and Maine, landscapes, and portraits with exacting detail, working primarily in watercolor and tempera instead of the more typical oil or acrylic. “I mean, of course I made it for Vanity Fair, but the whole time I was thinking about her family.Andrew Wyeth, one of America's best-known Realist painters of the 20 th century, created canvases imbued with the mysteriousness of the real world, thus challenging traditional notions of reality. “I made this portrait for her family,” says Sherald. This is Sherald’s nod to Taylor’s future and how her life was taken from her. There are other painstaking, heartbreaking details: the gold cross on a chain necklace the engagement ring Taylor would never get to wear, on her left hand ( photographed by LaToya Ruby Frazier). The whole painting really becomes about her.” The monochromatic color allows you to really focus on her face. “The color that I chose almost had a resplendence to it. Then she hit on blue, a shade that echoes Taylor’s March birthstone, the aquamarine. “ ‘Breonna, what color do you want this dress to be? Please, tell me what color you want this dress to be,’ ” Sherald says she mused. She tried a rainbow of options, yellows and reds and pinks, but none felt quite right, until she invoked the portrait itself. During the painting process, Sherald added movement to the dress, and a slit-“I thought, What would I want if I were 26.”Īs for the hues, “painting someone posthumously, I wanted it to feel ethereal but grounded at the same time,” Sherald says. “I wanted her family to look and say, I can see my daughter and sister in this.” A friend sent Sherald an image of actress Danielle Brooks wearing an Elder piece, and Sherald found Elder on Shoppe Black, a digital platform curated by husband and wife Tony O. “When thinking about what she was going to wear, I wanted Breonna to like it,” says Sherald. Jasmine Elder of JIBRI, an Atlanta-based fashion designer, created a crepe dress specifically for the cover. Sherald found a young woman with similar physical attributes, studied Taylor’s hairstyles and fashion choices, and drew inspiration from things she learned about the young woman-that she had been a frontline worker in the battle against COVID-19 that her boyfriend had been about to propose marriage that she was self-possessed, brave, loving, loved. Sherald took extraordinary care in reimagining Taylor, inflecting her portrait with symbols of the 26-year-old’s life. Painting Taylor, a person she had never met, who would never be able to sit for her, presented a unique challenge. Sherald’s process typically begins with taking a picture of her subject. She calls this portrait a contribution to the “moment and to activism-producing this image keeps Breonna alive forever.” Those are the kinds of people that I am drawn towards,” says Sherald, who is immunosuppressed and has been unable to participate in protests. Taylor is an “American girl, she is a sister, a daughter, and a hard worker. That oil-on-linen portrait was her first commissioned work-until Breonna Taylor. In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which led to her painting Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018. For more than 20 years, Amy Sherald has been putting the narratives of Black families and Black people to canvas.
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