Painting to Salako Olajide, a fine artist, is like drinking water every day; his soul feels thirsty when he is not painting; and in order to keep his creative soul hydrated, he paints everyday, as this is what he lives for.
Although he has practiced for a decade as a professional full-time studio artist, completing a painting or drawing is still a struggle. Trying to pour out his soul; or depict his thoughts on canvas; and sometimes getting the colour scheme right; or striking the right composition are not as simple as they look, said the artist.
“Most of the time when you are painting, every masterpiece is a struggle. At every stage of the painting you get hooked. The only thing I do at this stage is to put the work aside and look for an empty canvas; and start another work to enjoy myself. Maybe later I will go back to the work when I have the inspiration to complete it,” the artist, who graduated from Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Ijanikin, Lagos, said.
That is the reason some paintings are signed with different dates, adding that rather than discard the work, “you wait until you have the inspiration to be able to finish it up. Is not something you throw away because it takes an effort to prepare the canvas and the underlayer, which is also part of the painting and one of the strengths of the painting.
“If you throw it away,” he added, “then you will be throwing every painting away because you must struggle at a particular time on every painting. You can just wake up tomorrow and you get inspired again and you continue with the painting.”
What attracts you first to Olajide’s painting is his blend of colours. “I like to work with more of grey and warm colours,” confessed the artist, currently practicing at the Universal Studios of Art (USA), at the National Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos.
Most of the colours in his paintings are not fixed. He has to mix the colours to get the colour that he needs. “Sometimes I try to remove one of the colours from the palette and do research on another kind of colour. And we don’t have some of the colours here in Nigeria. I have to ask my friends outside the country to help me buy them.”
The artist gave the credit of his mastery of colours to his professional mentors, who have influenced him. “It is all about tutelage, learning from the masters. The people I have around me have really influenced me, career-wise. There are colours they use that I don’t use and there are colours they use that when I use them, I enjoy the result of my painting.”
Often time when he mixes colours, he doesn’t achieve his desired result and what he does when this happens is to keep mixing the colours. “You don’t expect to get the absolute result when mixing colours, but it depends on the colour scheme you are working with. So every colour on your palette has to summit to the scheme you are working with. So, if I mix my colours and don’t get it, I keep mixing it until I get the result I want to achieve. I wouldn’t clean the colour because I didn’t get my result, I just keep mixing because I work on layer upon layer.
“And sometimes when you paint, the transparency of colours plays a major role. That is why when you paint a particular thing, you find it difficult to repeat it because for you to mix that same colour again, it is more difficult, it is not a machine that did the painting because you used human effort to mix a particular colour.”
Lack of recognition, he said, is his greatest challenge: “My profession,” he rued, “is kind of relegated. Artists are not recognised. We find it difficult to mingle with other people because when the government wants to talk, they talk about other fields; and talk less about the fine artists; and people have this mind-set that artists are lazy people. Today, as a professional artist, I see that the field is not for lazy people because you need more than twenty-four hours to work as an artist.”
Olajide is currently working on environment issues as they affect him; and some of the common subjects you see in his works are female figures: “I like painting ladies, like royalty, women from royal home, most of my subjects are from royal home.”
When asked if he can remember the number of works he has created in his ten years of practice, he simply said: “I don’t keep record. Asking me how many works I have created, is like asking me how many litres of water I have drunk for ten years. Art is my soul, I paint every day and in a day I can do as many drawings as possible.”
Were there days Olajide didn’t feel like painting or just take a break from doing art? “Yes, when I am not painting, I relax by looking at my works and enjoying my creativity.”
Having a solo exhibition is every artist’s dream, but Olajide has not had one and he hopes to have one soon. “To have a solo exhibition is not easy. For a successful solo exhibition, you need a body of works that has the same trend, the same look and the same philosophy. But I am open to solo soon because I am working towards that direction. So, I am working on a particular theme and what you are going to see in my solo is a reflect of my movement.”
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