faun-songs:

iirc and those aren’t just any random faces; the artist takes moulds from the faces of real life people, creates a cast and pours out a reference to use for his works

yeah here’s an article on that

The labor-intensive process involves making a mold and cast of each model’s face, reworking the cast plaster sculpture, producing a version in resin and adding a chrome layer with artificial eyelashes. The final sculpture then serves as a model for the hyper-realistic oil painting

so he ‘immortalizes’ the beauty of existing black women, taking inspiration from 

Benin ivory masks and Ife bronze heads(quoted from the same article)