Between Paintings and Spirituality

By Yinka Olatunbosun

For emerging artist Paul Ayihawu, art is a vehicle for expressing his faith and exploring memories. While he didn’t start off his education in arts, he made a detour at the completion of his secondary school education by enrolling in an apprenticeship program with Awesu Gafar. Before then, he had always been fascinated by portraits. After making several impressive yet amateurish attempts at painting using nylons and poster colours, he concluded that he needed some guidance. “I was trained on sand portraits,” he recounted during a telephone interview recently.

He reflected on his three and a half years of apprenticeship program with Gafar Awesu, who introduced him to sand portraits. “This was what I did before I went to Lagos State Polytechnic, where I studied. There was a time I used bottle wraps to do paintings because I couldn’t afford acrylic.”

He stumbled on charcoal and became very skilled in using it as a medium for his creative output. “Overtime, I started using charcoal, especially for skin tones, and I used acrylic for backgrounds.”

In time, he also met with Mr. Muyiwa Akinwolere, who taught him more about contemporary art. “What I previously knew was from the perspective of making commissioned works for people. But Mr. Akinwolere let me know that art is not just about making portraiture alone. You have to tell stories. That’s where I started developing my narratives.” In this series called ‘Born Again,’ he presents a collection of paintings inspired by the Christian faith, representations of black figures, as well as aspects of his childhood memories.

“It was until 2020 after my residency in Ghana that I started to focus on what my art would be in the long term,” he continued. “I want to tell a story that will transcend the chains of time. The first thing that came to mind was the representation of my faith in my works—weaponising my work to fight the battle of faith.“ My works are inspired by the scriptures and translated into paintings with the hope that people will see it and connect to the deeper sense of it. After I started experimenting from this perspective, things began to come to me. One of the ideas includes the representation of the spiritual man in the principal painting. How will I paint so that you see the spiritual rather than the aesthetic essence of the painting?”

To find an answer to this question, he embarked on personal research. “It’s a continuous conversation. I will try to start that Born Again series. I used to keep a photo book of my friends before they got married and at the early stage of their marriage. Funny enough, it was at that moment of their lives that they were all giving their lives to Christ. My grandfather was a herbalist. But my dad gave his life to Christ.”

That Christian faith trickled down to him. On the church’s influence on art during the mediaeval period, the artist explained how the church still forms the basis of some of his paintings. “There was a painting by a famed painter in the 1800s put in a museum. A lady went on a museum tour and became exhausted. She had museum fatigue. She went to a particular corner of the museum to sit down, and right in front of her was this painting called ‘I suffered this loss for you.’“

This painting had such a profound effect on her that she was moved to write a poem, which is a canon in Christian faith today. “I want my work to have the same effect on people. If someone has been depressed for a long time, I want my work to make the person get some relief. It is much more important that it comes from the scriptures and not my personal ideology.”

For him, Bible texts usually inspire mental pictures. His painting titled ‘The Joy in the Presence of God’s Angel’ is based on a picture of a chorister taken from his parents’ wedding. He explored this memory to draw out the subject matter of the Christian faith and how the Bible referenced the church as the bride of Christ.

Another work titled ‘Unto Us, A Son is Given’ was interrogated on the subject matter of the male child and patriarchy. The artist explained how the work is not meant to push gender arguments. “The gender question was not an issue in Bible time. It has only become an issue in this era of women’s activism. It is written in the Bible. It is about the coming of Jesus. The idea is to talk about the prophecy of Jesus as a saviour to mankind.”

Another work titled “The Waiting Room” paints the larger picture of delayed expectations. “It also hinges on the idea of waiting to see someone, perhaps in an office environment,’’ the artist explained further. “You will have to wait in that waiting room pending the time that the executive director or something will be able to attend to you.“ Your behaviour and demeanour and how you treat others would be watched. It is even the most important part of the interview, but most people don’t pay attention to that. So the idea behind the painting is that while you are awaiting the answers to those things you are requesting from God, your behaviour in that waiting room is much more important than the answer itself.”

The Born Again series is largely influenced by spiritual themes while exploring personal memories to produce authentic art pieces.