January 02, (THEWILL) – Art history is replete with stories of child prodigies starting to doodle very early in life. Pablo Picasso is one famous example. It has been said the Iberian-born, world-renowned artist started drawing as soon as he could fit his tiny fingers around a pencil. Of course, he was guided by his father who was a teacher in an art school in Malaga where Picasso was born.
Abayomi Barber who died aged 93 last week didn’t have the luck of a father who was an art instructor. But like the Spanish legend, Barber took to drawing very early on. According to him, he frequented shrines in Ile Ife in his younger years – not to consult the gods on what the future will be but to learn and admire the art works in those temples.
For a whole week, children in his school visited some of the shrines and were shown the sculptural pieces.
“During that week,” Barber recalled in an interview once, “school children were taken to shrines in Ile Ife where we beheld sculptures by ancient Ife artists. I was one of the children who visited the shrines. The instructors showed us the deities and their names. This was where I took interest in sculpture. I practically taught myself how to make sculptures.”
After his informal art education in the Ife sanctuaries, the young artist began to limn, to sculpt. He started by drawing those close to him: his father, for one. Dad was always impressed. He also immortalized some village elders on paper, gladly showing off his portraits of the senior citizens. Next was his uncle who would later become the Ooni of Ile Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi.
Like any excited preteen would, the young lad breathlessly showed his uncle portraits of him he had done. He rewarded him correspondingly, a coin or two for his painterly effort.
Like the restless spirits they are, most artists are sometimes on the move, never quite settling down for too long in one location. The budding Ile Ife artist was something of a peregrinator, sometimes forced to take to the road by circumstances beyond his control.
At Ife, his uncle thought he was becoming a coddled kid. So, he urged him to repair to Ilesha – a town some 39km from Ife. Barber did and continued his painting, mostly of senior and well to do citizens.
You could say it was in Ilesha the artist experienced a turning point in his nascent career. “When I was at Ilesa, my uncle helped me to secure a warehouse which became my first studio,” Barber told an interviewer in 2017 when he was 88. “I became popular in no time because I made sculptures of big people in the town.”
It was not only the big people in Ilesha who took notice. The daughter of one of the senior citizens fell in love with his paintings, prelude to falling in love with the painter himself. “At Ilesa, there was this beautiful girl who frequented my studio to behold my art works and marvel,” he said in the same interview with Taiwo Ojoye of Punch. “Over time, I got closer to the girl. Her admiration for my work also led to an admiration for me. We became close friends and we fell in love.”
Her father would have none of it. But his daughter was so besotted with the painter she couldn’t just leave him. What to do?
Send the painter out of town. (It is just possible the wealthy Ilesha man, a reluctant in-law, for that matter, would have marked down her daughter for the son of another prosperous citizen like him and not a young man traipsing around with brushes, paints and easel.) And so, Barber, once again, found himself on the move, this time to Lagos where he enrolled at Yaba Technical Institute and soon distinguished himself. Of course, his instructors took notice, with one of them confessing his student could outdraw him.
It has also been said of Picasso that he paid little or no attention to his classes while in school. Abayomi was similarly inclined at Yaba Tech. He left school to set up a studio Abayomi Barber Studio where he continued to paint, sculpt. At this time by his own admission, he used to frequent the Marina in Lagos and wistfully imagined himself in one of those ships sailing off to Europe.
One day, he and a friend approached a sailor and made their wish known, of wanting to follow him to Europe, London precisely. The only way the two youngsters could travel was as stowaways. Okay, save some money and get your passports ready, the sailor told them. They did. But, first, the young chap had to inform his mother. His mother, in turn, told her elder brother, Oba Aderemi Adesoji who was governor of Western Region from 1960 to 1962.
Of course, the big man was scandalized but the hopeful traveller was unaware of the hurt he had caused his influential and well-connected uncle. As they say that “wetin de for Sokoto de for so ko to” meaning that what you are looking for from afar might be near you. It turned out to be so because his uncle only had to mention his nephew’s wanderlust to Obafemi Awolowo. That was how Barber won a scholarship to study art in London.
In a tribute written by Okey Uwaezeoke in THISDAY of November 10, 2019 on the occasion of a book published on the artist, the journalist had this to say about his wanderlust: “His restless legs and mind would later see him drift from a studio in the Obalende area of Lagos, where he carved thorns, to Lagos Grammar School, where he had to deal with recalcitrant students as well as to Yaba College of Technology, where the British art instructor extolled his proficiency in portraiture.”
Born in September 1928 a first child to a dad who was African representative of GB Olivant, a merchandise company owned by Europeans, Barber confessed from very early on that “my life found meaning in drawing, painting and sculpturing. People say I am one of Nigeria’s greatest artists. I don’t know whether they are right or wrong. All I know is that I produced some fantastic art works.”
How true! Some of his paintings adore the living rooms of prominent Nigerian collectors such as Engineer Yemisi Shyllon, and other private collectors. But there are some on public display. Chief among them is the bust of ex-military head of state, Murtala Mohammed in Lagos and another of his late uncle Oba Aderemi in Ife.
There are dozens of paintings, too, mostly oil on canvas. Pipe Dream, showing a traveller with his walking stick and clouding the air around with puffs of smoke from a long pipe clenched in his mouth is one of his cherished works. New Dawn depicts a day just breaking with vivid hues dominating the canvas.
Just as important as the art works he left behind are the students of art Barber trained in his school. There is Muri Adejimi Muri Adejimi, Olumuyiwa Spencer, Adebisi Alade, Olubunmi Lasaki, Archibald Etikenrentse, Adebayo Akinwole, Femi Adewolara, Ato Arinze, Olatunde Barber and Conrad Decker. They have become accomplished themselves. And just last year, when their instructor/ mentor turned 92, all of them were on hand to celebrate him at the National Gallery of Art in a show titled “Abayomi Barber: An Artist Born and Made.”
Senior journalist and onetime Arts Editor of The Guardian, Ben Tomoloju said of Barber that day. The artist was “distinctly a part of the surrealist movement in Europe, an attribute that has its signature in his works…The motive-force of surrealism is to allow the artist’s or writer’s unconscious to be expressed with complete creative freedom. With such freedom at the subliminal level of the human faculty, the Barber School legatees will tend to branch out for air in diverse directions even as it is obvious that they shoot out from the same stem.”
Barber was not content just being an artist. He was also a musician who played the saxophone as seriously as he concentrated on his art works. In fact, so good was he as a tenor saxophonist that he became “the best tenor saxophonist in colonial Lagos.”
Why won’t he after stints with David Bamigboye and Victor Olaiya musical bands?
In a remarkable profile of Picasso published in 1957 in the New Yorker, Janet Flaner wrote of the prodigy thusly: “What must have early distinguished him as beyond normal was his unconventionally high state of consciousness. He apparently started his life by being already intact—by being precociously ready and functioning to begin with—rather than by proceeding classically through the tentative, qualifying stages of development customary to the average very young human being.”
Though Barber did not have the international clout and traction of the enigmatic Spaniard, it is possible to assume he began life as an artist born ready who also got made in the process of his very rich creative output.
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
