Asafo flags - seen at South Bank. 'The picture painted itself'. When you place something somewhere it determines what happens next. Push and pull logic. Tensions within the work - handwriting ect. Contemporaneous possibilities of seeing antique flags and working with oils. Getting spatial works right. Made over several sustained sessions - v intense. There's a sponteneity. When you pratice scales or finger exercises you can improvise and get a composition right - talking about a sense of rhythm. The end result is not an interpretation of the flags - it was just something that triggered my imagination. One of the works which still has a lot of significance for me today. I rely on an archive of resources - things which I bring together or synthesise streetpaintings things I have inherited. If you ask me how I made this painting I can't give you a description. It's a very organic construct - the permutations led to new constructs - it's in the line of paintings that paint themselves. There a painting from last year on the last catatlogue - about a large weaving centre of Kente cloth - 1993 - by then I had already made a paper series called Tana Paintings. This painting was an adjunct or progessionor a sequence. It's architectural its sculptural it's also painterly. It deals with the same dynamics of painting that they use. The philosohy of painting comes out through the materials. If you make it in watercolour it influences the form. Sometimes it's thick sometimes it's silver or gold

Atta Kwami

No 2 Settlement

Related photographs, letters, catalogues and other documents will appear here as they are recorded.