Barely six weeks ago, I wrapped up a training on how to illustrate features on a drawing board and it has been so tedious and tasking. It started with my friend Vally, who has this iconic taste for art. Whenever I look at him make samples of his drawing and even use coloured pencils and other accessories for art to paint a thought in his head, I become so common to shame. I am always thinking about how well I can possibly draw if I give it enough time and strength.
Vally is my second favourite paddy, after Onyebuchi my college buddy. Both of them draw and they influence me so much to art, that I am eager to begin a journey on art even more seriously. At times, the pictures cluster in my head, but to interpret them with my fingers, become so unsupportive. I see Buchi make a typical drawing of a crawling lizard, a barking dog, a little infant that is pointing her beautiful head upwards. And when I ponder on their expertise, I become delusional.
Art is beautiful and the source of its beauty resonates from the fact that their hands make exactly what their heads figure. This is the pain I feel. I can’t conquer that superior captivation, even when I try. My efforts don’t bring a better accomplishment. It is either I am less the expectations I hunger for, or I am not in anyhow doing better. This is worrisome, especially when I am no longer having a patience in the reservoir. Pretty good, Vally and Buchi are exceptional. I admire them and they know I can pay for anything just to perfect in art.
In my college, our Fine Art teacher, Mama Chioma was freaky good. She suggested so many means on how to combine colours to frame out the secondary colours, but as very indifferent I was, I hardly decipher how to make colours seem compatible and cool. Buchi would listen, with his hands on the paper, trying to figure out the recommendations Mama Chioma would make. After classes, she signs out from the classroom, collecting samples of our art and I would always be bad, with my colleague, Ekene. I do not take it too seriously, even when I was cajoled and ridiculed by some of my mates.
The pretty hands of Buchi and Vally, yield a better resources to them. They can feed, book a flight to get a contract and even at times, walk into top officials houses just to submit their designs and fine art. I am not surprised at all. I am only happy that they never reduced those beautiful hands of them into a heap of ruins. There is progress in their life and their hands bring art into life.
Our hands represent a powerful significance. It is with our hands that we can be able to build pictures that can revoke the attention of the world. It is our hands that give joy to our art and maybe because a fascinating thought is an offspring of art, we create more sites of metaphysical concepts that have no attachment to reality. But they are luxurious at the finish, they represent a meaning, a silhouette of magnificence.
Even now that I can ramble with pride sequence, for reaching to a pedigree, I am not yet satisfied to have that access to what I wish to be. There is much I just wish to accomplish. I want to draw more perfectly like Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. It is such a dream I wish I can get hold at.
I am not giving up to art. Our culture signifies art and we can demonstrate our culture using the tool of art. It is simple. When we remember the beautiful hills at Ekwulumili, the Urashi at Umueze, the damp forest at Kafanchan, we can achieve an explanation of how we are, without giving many colonists the courage to make a different painting of us. We do not live to speak only about our endangered tradition, we can speak it through the instrument of art.
