Milestones of Ablade Glover’s Creative Odyssey  

At 88, the Ghanaian artist and educator, Ablade Glover, travels down history in an encounter with him and his works at The HourGlass Gallery, Victoria Island, Lagos. Yinka Olatunbosun reports

His renown had travelled ahead of him: at auction houses, group shows and public places where his works had been featured. Ablade Glover is one of the leading grandmasters of art in Africa, having made his mark with his deft use of the palette knife, a technique he imbibed right from his younger years in the studio. He called it his ‘trademark.’ 

Interestingly, his sojourn into becoming an artist was punctuated by a teaching career. Born and raised in Ghana at a period when colonialism was losing its steam, Glover was one of those who enjoyed the free teachers’ training programme instituted by the Ghanaian government. Kwame Nkrumah, a foremost nationalist and president, established the Ghana National College amongst others to produce the human resources needed for the country’s development. However, Glover didn’t think he belonged in the classroom. Still, he proceeded to obtain his teacher training education at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology between 1957 and 1958.

“I didn’t think I had the personality to stand before 45 children and start asking them questions,” he said. “I thought that I could train as an art teacher. I could do some art. So, I decided that I wanted to be an art teacher so that I could avoid the classroom. I was teaching in middle school in 1959. Then I saw an advert in the newspapers that was seeking for young men and women with some background in arts to be trained as textile designer at London’s Central School of Art and Design.”

Upon the completion of the course in 1962, Glover returned to Ghana immediately. “When I returned, disaster struck. They hadn’t built the factory for the textile designers,” he said. 

Saddened by the situation, he began to invest his time into studio work, drawing and painting with the hope of raising some money to return to the UK. Then, he met the wife of W.E.B Du Bois, a Pan-Africanist civil rights activist named Shirley Graham Du Bois. In a show done in honour of Nkrumah as the first president of a newly-liberated country, some of Glover’s works caught the attention of many including Nkrumah’s. He asked to see Glover immediately who shivered at the thought of the encounter. 

His fears were soon allayed upon finding out why President Nkrumah wanted to see him. After Glover revealed to him his intention to return to the UK, the President gave him a scholarship to study art education at the University of Newcastle. When he completed the programme, he was reluctant to return to Ghana for fear that he would be stranded. He did eventually.

Glover went on to further his education in the US, first at Kent State University and earned his master’s degree, and then at Ohio State University where he was awarded a PhD in 1974.

For someone whose career grew at the time when there was a wave of nationalism in Africa, Glover was more concerned about cityscapes, cultural life, nature than the political.

“I was just working hoping to make money rather than just being a teacher,’’ he explained. “The encouragement was good. The greatest thing for the artist is to have a window to show his works, for people to see. Nkrumah then opened what was called the Arts Centre. The government encouraged every part of the arts at the centre: painting, sculpting, dancing and singing. Anyone who showed small talent was encouraged. That was why I would say I was lucky. I took advantage of that.

“I was influenced by my immediate environment. My environment in Ghana was vigorous, unplanned unlike the US or the UK. If you go to the bank in the UK, everyone stays in line. But in Ghana, it is not like that. Those are things I tried to capture in my works, the crowd, the unstructured nature of the African community. I saw my work as the order in the disorder. The society around me is in disorder. So, I paint markets, streets and cityscapes.’’

Glover had always had an engagement with Nigeria even though he currently lives and works in Ghana. His contemporaries in Nigeria have shared the African spirit of hospitality with him on occasions that are still etched on his mind. Once, he was invited to participate in a seminar held at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

“I started meeting artists like Bruce Onobrakpeya and Kolade Oshinowo. It was Oshinowo who organised an exhibition many years ago that I came to. Also, I led the Ghana delegation to FESTAC ‘77 and I stayed at the Eko Hotel in Victoria Island,” he reminisced. 

Upon his retirement, he founded Artists’ Alliance Gallery to provide a platform for African artists to showcase their works and artistry. For over 20 years, he has been friends with Dozie Igweze, the curator for his new Lagos exhibition, The Passage of Time. He was excited to see the works, collected over a period of time telling a beautiful story. 

“Dozie has some paintings of mine that I would like to take back.

He imagined it all and worked towards the vision. Some had been collected over time while some are quite new. I’m surprised that someone would collect my works over the years and put them all together for a show like this,” he said as he invited the handful of journalists inside the HourGlass Gallery to have a preview of the show which opened on December 4. The opening of the show doubled as the public presentation of Dozie Igweze’s book titled Crowds and Queens: The Art of Ablade Glover.

The curator, Igweze described some of Glover’s market paintings as a reflection of the vitality of the African market. Every piece is a work of genius.

“His strokes evoke the rowdiness and haphazardness of these markets. He expresses the crush of people, the stalls, the movement, the sense of an endless back and forth of traders and patrons,’’ he said. He remarked also that the market paintings bring symmetry, order and rhythm to the chaotic markets without diminishing their vitality.

The piece titled ‘People’ was a product of sheer accident. After being dissatisfied by a painting, Glover began to apply a new layer of darker colour to tone down the red hues and thus created something different from the original concept. He thus unleashed a multi-layered, multi-coloured painting that mirrors diversity, complexities of human nature, identity and at the same time, harmony. The Market Queens is a metaphor of his perception of the African woman- elegant and strong.

In one of his cityscape series, he revealed how varied racial identities influenced the form and content of the work- which has an original piece hanging at the Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, USA. The show which runs till December 19th offers insight into the seven decades of his practice.