Guild of Professional Fine Artists of Nigeria President Segun Adejumo has been in practice for three decades. He is a full-time studio artist, gallery owner, and consultant, among others. He curated this year’s Lagos Art Expo organised as part of the Lagos @50 celebrations. In this interview with Udemma Chukwuma, he talks about the art profession and how school curriculum is affecting artists’ contributions to the industry.
Guild of Professional Fine Artists President Mr. Segun Adejumo has decried the content of schools’ curriculum for training of artists, especially fine artists, saying it is defective.
He blamed art schools for the poor quality of many unemployed graduate artists, saying that they offer training not rich enough to equip artists to meet the demands of the profession.
He observed that many artists could not draw after years of training in higher institutions.
Adejumo said: “There is something wrong with our educational system. People who would have been better as zoologist, chemist or accountant are forced to study other courses.”
He noted that university lecturers, for instance, simply lecture and do not teach, which he said, is one of the problems affecting the students.
“I always tell people that teachers and lecturers are different. Lecturers lecture and don’t explain much to students. But a teacher explains everything to students to assimilate and work upon. It is not the lecturre’s job for you to pass, but it is a teacher’s job for you to understand and pass. If a teacher has a student that does not pass, the teacher is a failure. If a lecturer does not have a student that do not pass, who cares, because he is not there to teacher but to lecture.
“The university system is designed for students to use their brains and interact with things by themself, not to be spoon-fed. So, teaching and lecturing are two different things. Unfortunately, many young ones go through school without picking anything from the institution.”
As a full time studio artist Adejumo said he had seen many artists who could not draw, yet they studied Art. This, he said, was an embarrassment to the profession.
“There are hundreds of them all over the place. This set of artists cannot even fit into the advertising agencies to handle graphics. They went to art school but they end up doing something else. Imagine Art schools setting objective questions for Fine Art students. Whereas as a vocational subject, you need to know what the student is capable of doing,” he added.
According to him, art ‘is something that requires minimum skill level to qualify to study it apart from being intelligent. Some students these days take art as their last resort, not as preferred choice. So you end up with people who have no clue about Art, no drawing background as well as talent.’
He urged any school offering Fine Art to conduct another interview for students wishing to study Art because there should be a different way of approaching Fine Art courses.
“They must have a drawing foundation. You can lie about anything in art, but you cannot tell lie about a drawing. Drawing is prerequisite of great rendition of any kind of Fine Art. I don’t know about conceptual art, but for Fine Art, you need drawing as a basss,” Adejumo noted.
Ten years ago, he opened a studio called One Draw Studio to help artists improve their drawing skill.
“The name One Draw came from experience. Most artists can paint but can’t draw. As a fact, a lot of them don’t have sketch pads and don’t have that drawing culture. If you want to know an artist, ask him to show his work process, which tells how he arrived at the finished product. The One Draw Studio project was borne out of the need for artists to engage in studio practice in one drawing a day,” he recalled.
Five years later he opened One Draw Gallery, a place where works produced in One Draw Studio are sold. “I have owned a gallery before and I came to find out that if you own a galley as an artist, you tend to suffer because you will not be able to work and be busy chasing clients.
“But things have overtaken that and we are not longer One Draw Studio anymore. We are more like an office. We have gone from that to a week intensive drawing. It became annual general project of one week of intensive drawing. The drawing project gave birth to the gallery. We came up with One Draw Gallery, which is into consultancy in art, studio projects, drawing and painting workshops as well as sale of the artworks,” he said.
Adejumo stressed that potential artist needs certain draughtsmanship to be a successful fine artist, which cannot be taught.
“People think artist is all about drawing, it goes beyond drawing. Drawing is a basic tool artist needs to express himself. It is difficult to tell a story as a sculptor or as a painter without knowing the story full well. It is difficult to be in any profession without learning those things that has to do with the profession,” he said of the art profession
According to him, earning regular income as an artist is a bit difficult, which was a reason he opened the gallery. To him, ‘being an artist is not a business that gives you regular income. I wanted to give artists the opportunity of another art outlet apart from the avenue to express themselves and to sharpen their skills in drawing and regular drawing based sculptors. It is also to give them the opportunity of an alternative art space where they can show their works.’
