RAOUL OLOU

I am a multidisciplinary artist, formally trained in filmmaking and a self-taught painter, based in Toronto. I transitioned from animated filmmaking, a practice where I was creating all frames of a film with drawing, to oil and gouache painting in 2019 because I felt painting was a more immediate way to document my life and surroundings when I moved to Toronto. Painting allowed me to explore physical phenomena, such as the movement and behaviour of light, that has always been essential to my practice. Through this transition, I came to realize that I am interested in creating work using material exploration because of the immediacy of painting. I am physically and directly involved with the subject I am expressing. I create work that references personal experiences, race, and ontology, inspired by the probabilistic nature of  quantum physics. My practice is a study of historical and traditional processes through anthropologie, speculative fiction, and intuition, expressed and embodied with painting, papermaking, and materials exploration. I have also recently started experimenting with gum bichromate photo printing, an 19th century analogue photo printing process, as a way to incorporate photos I take for painting references. In a recent artist residency— Annandale Artist Residency, in Prince Edward Island—I realized my photos I took, with intention to use for my process in painting, are more meaningful and expressive in the original medium. Thus, I have started to explore photography as a practice versus a process in referencing, that echoes and connects to my filmmaking training. Gum bichromate photo printing allows me to further manipulate images, similar to my painting and papermaking process.