The
Artist and the Story of Man (A commentary)
By Prof. Chike C. Aniakor
Is it given to the artist to retell the story of man? Does he
really know and can he narrate with empathy combined with the
warmth of creative sensibility, the beginning of that dawn of
creation when, according to Chinua Achebe, the lizards were in
their twos and threes and the python walked the pathway with
royal gait, its beautiful spots having been drawn from Sky’s
first weeping?1 Is that story also linked with his
other view that in the beginning rude power bestrode the world
unchecked. But the Almighty viewing his creation through the
undying eye of the sun decided to moderate power by tying along
its waistline a loincloth of peace and modesty2. If
so, is it with the story line riding on the tidal waves of
emotions, the metal tongue of the sculptor’s chisel dipped in
the flaming tongue of fire and waiting to strike, the painter’s
brushwork emotionally charged by its unvoiced incantations, the
lilting movements of the weaver’s shuttle or the clay slashes of
the ceramist that this story would be retold? In which case, the
voice of the cock that crows in a family compound becomes the
property of the community? Or does the artist have to play the
role of the mythical and famed eagle who decided to fly into
distant lands and wrestled with the creatures of the wild in a
furious combat from which it acquired its eternal radiance, the
plume of which is worn by ‘his’ human imitators?
Or shall we heed the words of Wole Soyinka that the African
world differs from the European by virtue of the totality of its
cosmic architecture?3 A dent on its cosmic shell
calls forth the need for ritual theatre for the crossing of the
abyss of transition and for cosmic restoration. Is it given to
the artist to cross this abyss of transition in order to tell
the story of man? Or is the story of man as mysterious as the
words of that masquerade who challenged his audience with “if
you know who I am say it”? There was deafening silence.4
Or could it be traced to the famed artist Van Gogh who in his
religious commitment to the ways of art and life cast a shadow
of doubt on Christian religion and in its place evolved his?5
He embraced nature – the landscape – explored and searched into
its inner secrets and mysteries. From it he discovered the
energy of his brushwork and the celestial flames of his searing
palette. He drove himself to the ultimate edge of emotional
instability but remained sane only in the artistic or plastic
sense. Is this the kind of sanity necessary in narrating the
story of man?
And yet any close encounter with or a deeper probing of the
universe and the story of man confronts us with the rude shock
of brutish facts. By the time anthropologist Leakey died in
1972, evidence from his archaeologist son and wife showed that
man’s ancestors had lived in Africa for more than two million
years. Add to this, another rude fact…6 universe is
so vast that by one estimate there are 100,000 million stars
from each human now on the earth. The Milky Way, the galaxy of
family of stars to which our ordinary sun belongs, measures some
100,000 light – years across. It alone contains 200,000 million
of galaxies in the universe.7 From one of such
galaxies, our own earth would merely represent a tiny dot in the
immensity of space. Is this why the Egyptians turned this into
the metaphysics of stone which is the pyramid so as to capture
something of the soul’s immortality and the story of man which
physical space recreates in its airless but sweeping vastness
and infinity?
The story of man is as intriguing in its seamless dimensions as
the lines of defence and exploration which artists erect or draw
and from which they make their creative sorties into the
mysteries of life and creation. This is the creative challenge
which the artist C. Krydz Ikwuemesi has plunged into like a fish
after a worm on the fisherman’s hook. According to him, he is
intrigued by the controversy behind man’s origin – the origin of
our planet, through creation or evolution? – birth, disease,
poverty, youth, old age, death, the mystery and cycle of life
and death, the problem of good and evil, the place of God in
this earth – bound scheme and beyond. He wishes that the artist
begins to wrestle with the possibilities that surround this even
while there is no consensus on any of the issues and in the
absence of any sign-posts to guide the way – farer. These
provide and have provided him with the creative centre or
gravity from which to ask questions and seek answers and use the
creative potency of art to evoke their nature, their puzzles and
mysteries- the joy, peace, man, angel, the devil and the beast,
their qualities, their subject- predicate relations and the
inverse of this. He is the seeker beyond the altar, beyond the
shrines of the homestead. He then is the eternal quest for
answers which are as elusive as those distant shadows on the
moon which myth had turned into the eternal wood cutter or that
pillar of war in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ which links the bowl
of water in the lake with the firmament above and high heavens.8
Is this why a person’s character among the Igbo is seen or
perceived as visual design (agwa) which may be good or
bad ‘ezi or ajo agwa’ such as the specks of the guinea
fowl (agwa ogazi), the beautiful spots of the python (agwa
eke) or those of the bush rat (agwa ogini)?9
These have both inspired uli body painting as well as the
artist himself. They provide the creative forte from which his
works have bound and gained renewed plastic health and visual
strength. Are their colours, high-keyed, vibrant and poetically
alluring, the visual avocations of the mysteries of life, the
riddle of the intersection of the cross –roads or the mythical
flight of the eagle into distant lands?”
Ikwuemesi’s artistic sorties into the story of man are borne on
the wings of creativity.
Asks the artist: “If the Florentines had reasons to feel like
immortal gods in 1400, according to the architect Leon Battista
Albertti, do we have such reasons today to feel like immortal
gods in our present situation?”. His works confront us with his
answers, his reflections, and, nay, his plastic utterances. From
his mythic imagination he has called forth images/symbols nursed
by good artistry. They incarnate the essence of being and
non-being, as thought-drops which contain an ocean of ideas.
They penetrate beyond their immediate threshold in search of
eternal rhythms that re-echo the music and songs of the
universe.
By defocusing reality in immediate terms without any loss of its
sub-system, new images are called forth and populate his cosmic
landscape. The familiar yields to the startlingly novel and
symbolic whether of man or object or nature. Through the mystery
of metaphor, forms reach out to their greater earth depths. They
point at those boundaries at the level of which all things loose
their immediate quality; renew themselves and reassert their
inner being. They disclose without over-yielding their deeper
essence. Only their visual attributes provide useful visual
clues. They reveal only to conceal.
Colours become vibrant without any loss in their plastic
pulsation, like the visual vocalization of eternal silence.
Colours dribble emotions at the antipodal levels of
consciousness and we begin to partake of those fluid zones of
existence in which, to borrow a Buddist imagery, the soul
returns to source as a drop of water and merges with the
immensity of the ocean.
Any wonder that for Ikwuemesi the story of man is the
thematic/stylistic encapsulation through over forty two works in
diverse colour media of God the Great Artist brushing
in the last contours of the universe or Come
Let Us Make Man in our own Image or better still,
Morning Yet on Creation Day and perhaps best in
Rhythms of happiness or Portrait of Poverty.
The Marriage of Somuadina furnishes
us with his plastic essay on this theme which finds resolution
in Thoughts of a Nubile Girl and soothed
thematically by Because of You.
What his pictorial themes celebrate as the artist’s vision of
the story of man is matched by the fruitful techniques that have
brought them into plastic being – the sinuous colours, forms
saturated with glazed effects of the watercolour technique which
seem to bathe them in cosmic light.
One need not of course overlook some of the technical flaws –
though few; or the artist’s tendency to sometimes mobilize some
other technical resources. There is still much scope. He is
young and growing and we ought to view these within the wider
compass of the artist’s quest for the story of man. For the
urgency of telling a story quite often abandons the needed
discretion by which the artistic greyhound ought to be separated
from the artistic poodle. It seems, however, that in the ways of
arts, the lion can sleep under the same shed with the deer or
antelope.
That the artist has opted to wrestle with the
challenges of the story of man is to remind us that story
telling whether in words or colours is ultimately man’s
civilizing light by which, to borrow from the poet Kofi Anyidoho,
the orphan child can be led through the forest paths of life.10
The words of Shango Baku could as well have been those of the
artist himself. Hear him. “I dare. I dare. Blank is the page of
life until the daring of exposure tells a tale”.11
Notes
-
Chinua Achebe, Beware Soul Brother, Enugu:
Nwamife, 1972
-
Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah,
London: Heinemann, 1987
-
In the section of his novel to which reference is made, the
novelist Chinua Achebe tries to portray two aspects of the
Igbo cosmos which underlie the story of man. According to
him, the notion of one God based on the principle of
monotheism will not make any sense in Igbo theology or shall
we say metaphysics and cosmogony. The firmament which is the
abode of sky deities, usually male, is balanced by the earth
which is the abode of the earth and goddess, Ala.
Hence the Igbo are wont to say that wherever something
stands, something else stands beside it – reference which is
metaphorically conveyed in the cyclic movements of the snake
‘ije agwo’ in which each spiral is a metaphor for the
dynamic nature of the Igbo world characterized by an art
which is less tranquil than it is mobile if not aggressive
as Achebe (1984) has suggested.
-
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World,
London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press,
1976.
-
This daring challenge from a mystical and authoritative
masquerade shows that there are powers in the Igbo cosmos
to which silence born out of difference is the only positive
response. The contrast between the masked spirit’s
commanding powers and the submissive response of the
audience heightens the authority of the former in a more
visible and manifest way.
-
Robert Wallace, The World of Van Gogh 1953 -1890, New
York: Time – Life Books, 1969.
-
Barbara Adams, “Leakey Memorial Institute”, Topic,
Issue No. 116, p.31.
-
Chinua Achebe. Ibid.
-
It is interesting to note that the cosmic ideal of good
character has its reference in the patterned surface of
selected animals and birds from the environment. Good
character connotes appropriateness of being if not perfect
existence.
-
In his exploration of soul blues the poet Anyidoho is of the
view that poetry instances the human soul in its quest to
remove the thorns that circumscribe life and deny us self
knowledge.
-
The West Indian Poet who certainly has a Rastafarian
background and thinking uses prose-poetry as a tool of
darling and self innoculation. He confronts life at the
dread level where rules lose all their manacles and the
artist/poet becomes the seer; the eagle that can look the
sun in the face, See, Shango Baku, From the Dread Level
(1976).
Prof. Aniakor is Painter, Critic and
Historian of Art at the University of Nigeria.
Introduction
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