Hello, this is Everything Else, the FG Culture Podcast.

I'm Gris.

And I'm Al.

On this episode, Gris will be speaking to the artist Kerry James Marshall, best known for

his large-scale paintings of African American life.

His high-profile collectors and fans include the Obama's, Beyonce and Jay-Z, Drake, Dr. Dre,

and Kanye West, now known as Yay.

In fact, P. Diddy bought a painting of his called Past Times earlier this year for $21.1 million,

making Kerry James Marshall the most expensive living African-American artist.

So, Gris, you went to visit Kerry James Marshall at David's Verna Gallery this week. For those who don't know his work,

can you give us a flavour of it? Yeah, so Kerry James Marshall is much better known in the US

where he's from than he is here. He is known for these often very large-scale paintings, almost like kind of contemporary history

paintings, but rather than depicting kind of grand figures from Western history, they show

often quite intimate scenes of daily life, so a couple embracing families in parks, a scene with children running around in a hair salon.

They've often got sort of little nods and hints to great works of art history, which...

Specific works.

Yeah, so like Holbeinsey Ambassadors, for example.

There's a famous painting which alludes to that work, but you find these kind of these references and these little hints and jokes all the way through what he does.

I guess one of the most striking things about his work is that, so he's painting African Americans almost exclusively, but he renders skin tone with literally black paint.

So the skin tone of the characters in his work is not the skin tone of real life people.

I mean, he uses like black pigment.

And he's making a political point through doing that.

...