Sahara Longe is a Sierra Leonean-British figurative painter, whose work is reminiscent of allegorical and resplendent paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque, reimagined to contain Black figures in contemporary setting. Longe’s work varies from depictions of ordinary moments in life to large scale mythological paintings, drawing her inspirations from Rubens, Velasquez and Gauguin. Longe trained at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, where she learned classical traditions of oil painting and studied from Old Master paintings. Painted in a realist manner, her works maintain an intentional loose, expressive brushwork.
This exquisite double portrait Striped Collar is charged with feeling as green, purples and red come together to suggest form and shape. Like early 20th century painters, including those in the Die Brücke group of Expressionism, Longe uses colour to convey emotion and a graphic use of line to guide our eyes around the painting. Line is a connective tissue, drawing the women close to one another and uniting the foreground, middle ground and background into a single whole.
Sahara Longe (b. 1994) is based in London. In October 2021, Longe was selected for the Palazzo Monti Residency by The Great Women Artists. Presentations of her work include Art Lagos (2021), 1:54 Art Fair (2021); Westbund Art Fair (2021); IRL (In Real Life), Timothy Taylor Gallery (2021); Women in Paris, Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021); Get a load of this! , Daniel Raphael (2021); Heart of the Matter, Gillian Jason (2021).