By Stephen Williams
For the
acclaimed Ghanaian painter Ablade Glover, art has been a way of life for more
than five decades.
He
celebrated his 85th birthday earlier this summer with a major exhibition at the
October Gallery in London, titled “Wogbe Jeke - We Have Come a Long Way”. The
show comprised vibrant new works that reflect Glover’s passion for Ghana’s
culture and energy, and it garnered him new fans who found themselves diving
into oceans of colour: reflecting marketplaces and crowded streets.
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Ghanaian artist and professor Ablade Glover.
(Photo: J. Greet. Courtesy October Gallery, London.)
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Those
familiar with his work know that the paintings appear to be composed in a simple
manner but are, in fact, highly complex and skilful, and this becomes apparent
the longer one looks.
As
the October Gallery says: in addition to Glover’s “fearless use of colour”, it
is his use of perspective that also draws the viewer in.
“Often
the perspective that Glover employs is from a high vantage point overlooking
the crowd. From this position, Glover effortlessly transports the viewer into
the scene,” the Gallery adds. “Almost every single painting reveals a double
aspect, being at once an explosion of colour and a detailed observation of
reality. Abstract shapes transform into flocks of birds, bustling market scenes
or townscapes.”
A Life
Fellow of the Royal Society of Art in London as well as a Fellow of the Ghana
Academy of Arts and Sciences, Glover has had an important impact on
contemporary arts both in his homeland and internationally. In an interview
during the London exhibition, he told SWAN how his career began and
progressed.
Glover
recalls his early years as being a happy time, bucking the myth that an unhappy
childhood makes for great art. His upbringing might be considered uncommon in
some ways, however.
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Ablade Glover, Red People IV (Detail), 2019. Oil on canvas,
152.5 x 152.5 cm. (Photo: J. Greet. Courtesy the Artist and
October Gallery, London.)
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“I
was born in Accra and I come from a family where the father stays in one house
and the mother in another,” he said.
When
he was around six years old, he was taken from his mother’s house to stay with
his father.
“It was a perfectly natural system, even a traditional
arrangement, although it is dying out now; usually boys were raised by their
fathers and girls with their mothers,” he told SWAN.
Schooled
at a Presbyterian boarding school, Glover went on to train as a teacher for a
year.
“I
realised general teaching was not for me, I didn’t have the patience, so I went
back to college to train as a specialist art teacher at the Kumasi College of
Technology,” he said.
Having
completed a two-year diploma, he found it difficult to attain the specific
teaching position he wanted. But he came across a government advertisement to
work in a new textile factory to be built in Tema that involved being sent to
London, to the Central School of Art and Design, for a four-year training
course in fabric design and printing.
“It
was so-o-o cold,” he recalled with a chuckle, “but I stuck it out. I was
missing Ghana, although London was very interesting, and after completing my
studies I went back home.”
Glover
was to discover that not only had Ghana’s political climate become very
volatile, but the proposed textile factory at Tema had not even begun to be
constructed. “I was left high and dry,” he said. “I wanted to get
out.”
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Ablade Glover, Market Scene, 2019. Oil on canvas.
(Photo: J. Greet. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery,
London.)
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Meanwhile,
he had to find work, and so accepted a general teaching post in the town of
Winneba (which, after living in London, he found a little slow); later he
joined Ghana’s Ministry of Information in Accra, producing posters, which he
freely admits was akin to creating propaganda.
He
continued to paint, however, and had a powerful mentor through his friendship
with Shirley du Bois, wife of the famous civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The couple had been invited to Ghana, and Shirley would arrange soirées at her
home to exhibit Glover’s paintings, inviting her friends to come, view, and
hopefully buy his works.
He
confided to Mrs. Du Bois the problems he was having in securing a second
overseas stint - having received one scholarship, getting another seemed
unlikely.
She
readily agreed to help and organised a meeting with President Kwame Nkrumah, but
Glover was nervous at this prospect. “I had heard the rumours doing the rounds
in Accra that Nkrumah sometimes killed people!” he explained.
“After
about a week or so, she sent a car for me and then we both went to the
presidential offices, were shown into a room when another door opens and in
walks Nkrumah. ‘This is the young man I was telling you about,’ Mrs du Bois
announced. That’s how I met the president!"
The
upshot of the meeting, this brush with history, was that Nkrumah wrote Glover a
note to take to the relevant ministry. He was then able to register to study
textile design at Newcastle University in the UK.
It
was there that a tutor, watching him paint, suggested that he use a palette
knife. “I took his advice and found a new way to paint. I dropped the brush,”
Glover said.
Later he was invited to the United States to complete a doctorate and went to study at Kent
State University, Ohio, in 1972 - an institution infamous for the shooting of
anti-Vietnam war demonstrators on the campus by home guard soldiers just a few
years previously.
His being
able to attend Kent State was thanks to a benefactor (in fact a tutor) who
covered his tuition fees. “I was very touched by that generosity,” Glover said.
But
whether painting in the UK or the US, the subject of his paintings always
revolved around his home, Ghana. He admits to being fascinated by Ghana’s
markets and market women.
Many
of his works have been market scenes in a style that has been imitated but rarely
equalled by others. These paintings in many ways echo his appreciation of the
Dutch master, Vincent van Gogh.
For
the future, Glover says he will continue painting and exhibiting. He is
represented by galleries in Nigeria and South Africa as well as the October
Gallery in London and has his own gallery in La (sometimes known as Labadi), a
suburb of Accra where he was given land to build the Artists Alliance Gallery.
Glover opened it in 1993, and his wife is the administrator. It has become one
of the landmarks for Ghanaian arts.
Stephen Williams is a London-based journalist who writes about African arts and
culture. He contributed this article to SWAN.
