Interview with Jide Aje
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I've seen your early work. What were the motivating factors around your shift from representational art to abstraction?
I really don't know. I think it was just time. The representational work came mostly as a result of the studio practice I had while in school and immediately after school. Much of the work in school was representation—life drawing, portrait drawing, composition, and so on. There was a little bit of abstraction mixed in, or rather, I'd say the representational compositions had some abstraction mixed in the composition. I've always been drawn to abstraction, but it took a while to pull everything together.
Did you make the decision to make most of your work abstract in the United States or in Nigeria?
Here in the United States. I dabbled a little bit in Lagos, but it wasn't much. It was almost as an afterthought. And not really having an academic grounding in abstraction, I was probably pulling all the ideas and bits together and giving them time to percolate.
You began in industrial design, correct?
No, that's not correct. My first degree is in painting and I worked as a graphic designer in the advertising industry, with an eye to studying industrial and automotive design.
What group or movement, if any, would you say you were part of coming out of Nigeria, Lagos in particular?
Well, I was a strong member of the Society of Nigerian Artists, SNA, the Lagos chapter, which was probably the most active in Nigeria in the mid- to late-1980s. But the SNA is not an art group, nor a movement. I wouldn't quite say I was a member of the Ona group that was founded at the University of Ife by two of my instructors, Drs. Campbell and Okediji, because at the time of the founding, they lived in Ife as instructors, and I had graduated and moved to Lagos. I really wasn't part of it, but I knew of their activities.
So were those instructors your mentors? Whose work informs your own? [End Page 753]
That's a very interesting question. I think Okediji's work is an influence, especially in the use of three traditional color hues. There is a body of work I've done that is influenced by work that he was doing and what he taught, or tried to teach, while we were in Ife.
What are those three traditional colors?
Red, black, and white (pupa, dudu, ati funfun). I don't think that there's any particular artist whose work informs mine. After I moved to the United States and I became exposed to more art—especially abstract art, either directly when I was in college here, or museums, or through art magazines, which I didn't have access to in Lagos, I began to grow more interested in making abstract art. I was influenced by the various uses of diverse material. Moving to the United States exposed me to the wider possibilities of what could be done in art making, outside of the traditional use of acrylic or factory-made paints to create your work. But there hasn't really been one particular artist. There's a bunch of artists whose work I like. And I'm not really sure that their work influences my own, at least not directly.
It's my understanding that Nigerian artists tend to be associated with the trends or styles of the university where they study. Is that the case for you? Were you trained formally at the university?
Yes, I was trained formally at the University of Ife. Now there's really no such thing, stylistically, as the Ife school. The Ife school could probably be best described as all the students that graduated from Ife. The Ife school is unique in that.
And are there any markers of that? Is there something that students graduating from the University of Ife do that you might recognize?
I would say sometimes you might find the use of Adire motifs in...
