While Mushin, a densely populated area in Lagos, is notorious for some infamous reasons, it also harbours something lovers of visual art all over the world long for. It houses the home, studio and art gallery of Bruce Onobrakpeya, world acclaimed visual artist.
You may need to fight your way through the chaotic Ladipo Spare Parts Market, or through the ever-crowded Iyana Isolo (as long as you don’t mind the physical exercise by the street urchins), but on getting to the two-storey building right at the heart of Papa Ajao Mushin, the wealth of artifacts, history made alive through art and colourful inspiration in drawings, paintings and installations will compensate your effort.
If you are lucky to meet the old man working in his studio, then you are in for a journey in the beautiful world of visual art with the legendary Onobrakpeya.
As expected, the house is simply an art shrine. It is built for that purpose. While you are about feting your eyes on one of the best of visual art collections on the African continent, the patron of the edifice joins you on the visual tour of his works with momentary interlude of his life, advice and displeasure with modern artists.
He does all these in a low, shrieking voice, and perfect explanatory skills that only geographers have.
Onobrakpaye is truly a pioneering status in the visual art circle. The artist of renown, within and outside the country, parades a prodigious artistic vitality and creative ingenuity that marvel his contemporary and even the new school of artists.
Despite thousands of works beautifully and intellectually done in different media of artistic expression, Onobrakpaye still revere the likes of Ben Enweonwu, Inan Abobu, Lashikan and Akeredolu as pioneering status in the cult of visual artists in the country. That alone makes his accessible and rare species in his time.
“My kind of art is experimental art. I try to fuse many ideas together in order to get something that is new, the old and the new to project the future. My art belongs to the synthesis group which is the name given to the Zaria art society group. The synthesis theory is that you look at the old art and extract the valuable things and add equally valuable ideas from outside; there’s a fertilisation, use that to produce arts for now and project for the future,” according to the renowned artist.
You need to participate in his Harmattan Workshop series to discover how much passion and contribution ‘Baba Onobrakpaye,’ as he is fondly called by younger artists, has made to the development of the arts, especially visual art to global recognition in Nigeria.
Since 1998, when this forum for artists was initiated, Baba has groomed thousands of Nigerian and foreign artists who usually come to learn from the source. Apart from learning, they dine and wine on his table, hear his philosophies and get convinced of the place of art in the society.
For the Baba, African art has over the millennium contributed to the life of the people through their religion, their philosophies, their sorrows, their joys, life expectations, which are all encapsulated.
He notes further that at the turn of the century, African art influenced global art. “The so-called modern classical art, actually originated from African art. People like Picasso, Brachs, among other European artists, got their lead then from Africa,” he states.
Musing a little, the elder art statesman, commends Leo Phobillus, a German traveller, for his efforts at discovering Nigerian arts that were among the first to be known of African arts in the world.
While Phobillus’ efforts positively took Nigerian arts to Europe, Onobrakpaye says on a sad note, the Benin massacre of 1897, where Benin art was looted and sold to many collectors all over the world brought Nigerian art and by extension African art to the limelight.
But regrettably, he says it took many years for European experts to acknowledge that these arts that were taken as war booty were really very high arts, but “today, it is known that the first artwork really to get to Europe to show African art, as art that is worth collecting, was the Benin art collected in 1897.”
Tracing the visual art in Nigeria, he notes that before the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida, visual art was in high tempo, but after the devaluation and the subsequent political crises and so on, art went down. However, the legendary artist is hopeful that things will get better again in the arts – “art is going up.”
Works on the art of Bruce Onobrakpeya span a period of over 50 years.
The first segment is the Mythical Realism (1957–1962), which represents paintings and lino cut prints that depict folklore themes, and Northern landscapes (Zaria). The second segment focuses on the artist’s workshop experiments and his Bronzed lino relief series, otherwise known as the Sunshine Period (1962–1967).
The Mask and the Cross (1967–1978) series represents the period when the artist executed several Christian themes commissioned by the Church, such as Nativity II (Iino engraving), The Last Days of Christ (plastocast), Obara Ishoshi (bronzed Iino relief), and Pope John Paul (metal foil).
The fourth segment represents the historical vignettes. These are pictures known as the Symbols of Ancestral Groves (1978–1984). The Sahelian Masquerades (1984–1988) were pieces created to highlight the destruction of the environment. The Mask Series (1990–1995) represent the development of images, which inspired depictions of masks treated in different print media that bring out the philosophies of the people. Social Unrest (1995–1999) is the period of strife within the society. Finally, we enter the Installations Period (1995 – date), which is the period the artist embarked on installations as an art form.
OBINNA EMELIKE
