Art
Ghanaian painter Tafa: ‘The painting is greater than the artist’
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The Ghanaian artist Tafa Fiadzigbe – known to the art world simply as Tafa – has come a long way. “I grew up in the slums of Ghana, and the slums in the third world are very different from slums here in America,” he said to the Guardian. “I knew people who ate from garbage dumps. When I was growing up, if someone told me I was going to be in the company of people like Bill Clinton and have them support my art, I’d have thought they were crazy.”
Now showing at Chelsea’s Pictor Gallery in New York until 25 February, Tafa’s art is at once visceral, transcendent, and abstract. The pieces at his show include a frenzied protest march against police violence, an ethereal image of a goddess making her ascent, and a homage to Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exoticized by 19th-century Europeans for her bodily proportions.
Pursuing his vocation, Tafa studied art as a college student in Ghana before setting his sights on New York City. Upon arriving in 1993, he quickly realized he had some major misconceptions about his adopted home. “Originally I thought there were just a few hundred artists in New York. Eventually I realized there were thousands and thousands from all over the world.”
Looking back, Tafa now believes that his lack of knowledge was actually an asset. “Maybe 95% of artists in NYC don’t make a living from their art. I didn’t know how hard it was to make your living from art. If I knew what I knew 10 years later, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I was lucky.”
A lauded innovator with the palette knife, Tafa turns countless lumps of color into paintings that cause intense feelings of motion and exuberance. Although his subjects vary widely, frequent themes are the Black struggle for equal rights, the majesty of contemporary sports, and the rhythms and movement of music. Whatever he is composing, for Tafa, dynamism is key.
“When I paint I like movement, and for the paint to be very dynamic. I use layer and layers, I scratch the paint, all to create the balance of movement and a rippling effect. I don’t want it to be static, I want you to feel the movement and power and energy. I want you to hear the sound and voices of the people, the anger and frustration and all that.”
A breakthrough moment happened for Tafa early on in this time in New York when David Dinkins, who was then in office as the city’s first Black mayor, came to one of Tafa’s shows and bought a piece. Besides being a prominent politician, Dinkins was also a known art collector and a fierce advocate for culture, and so was in a position to get Tafa noticed. “Because of Dinkins, a lot of people started coming to me and saying ‘I saw your art.’”
Pictor Gallery’s director Denise Adler happened to meet Tafa by chance when each of their daughters attended the same high school together. She quickly knew that Tafa was an artist she wanted to pay attention to. “When I met him, I realized he was the real deal. I noticed that he was very quiet and subdued, but his work is so colorful and loud. I love his color choices, his use of paint. I’m fascinated with artists who do texture like he does. It has almost a mixed media quality to it.”
Adler added that she was compelled by Tafa’s ability to combine sensual beauty with substance and depth. “The pieces are beautiful to look at, but they speak volumes to serious topics that are interesting. You look at it once and you see one thing, you look at it again and you see another thing. You see more and more as you look more closely. I love that.”
Professional sports has long been a favored subject of Tafa’s, and he shared that his fascination began when he was a young boy mesmerized by the soccer great Pelé. “Being a child in Ghana, everybody played soccer and knew about him,” he said. Looking back, Tafa laughed at how he had naively assumed Pelé was a compatriot: “I didn’t know he was from Brazil. I thought he was from Ghana.”
For Tafa, part of the attraction of sports is the grandeur of competition and the outsized personalities of elite athletes. This can be seen in a work like Pelé the King, which captures the precision and electricity of the soccer legend’s iconic bicycle kick. Melting into a background of bright red with one leg outstretched toward a soccer ball, Pelé looks less like a mortal than a deity.
“When I look at sport, there’s this religious aspect to it,” said Tafa. “To me, as religion becomes less and less important to parts of the world, now it seems like sports is the new religion. We have the gods and the deities and the saints at the sports bar. These are the myths and the gods of our times.”
In his artistic practice Tafa thrives on intuition, losing himself while the painting reveals itself to him. One such experience occurred live in front of a fervent audience at Madison Square Garden, when the artist composed a painting of the game while it played out before him. To Tafa, the pressure of combining performance, athletics, and his artistic vocation made the experience unforgettable. “It was so intense how everybody was looking at me. It was magical and beautiful.”
Frenzied and exhilarating, yet also calculating and controlled, Tafa’s paintings very much look like the product of a man at one with his canvas. His very diverse output is unified by a singular artistic style that speaks to Tafa’s intense connection to his work. “The painting has its own life, the painting is greater than the artist. So the painting takes you to a different direction from where you want to go. The painting sends me messages. It speaks to me – more than I try to control it, it liberates itself.”
- Tafa: The Echoes of Memories is now showing at the Pictor Gallery in New York until 25 February
Art
The Thief Collector review – the ordinary married couple behind a massive art heist – The Guardian
It was a brazen case of daylight robbery. In 1985, a couple walked into an art gallery on the campus of the University of Arizona and left 15 minutes later with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning shoved up the man’s jacket. In 2017, the painting was finally recovered – not by the FBI, but by a trio of house clearance guys in New Mexico. It had been hanging for 30 years on the bedroom wall of retired teachers Rita and Jerry Alter.
How an ordinary couple like the Alters pulled off one of the biggest art heists of the 20th century is told in this mostly entertaining documentary. You can imagine the story being turned into a podcast and it’s perhaps stretched a little thin for a full-length documentary. (Did we really need an interview with the couple’s nephew’s son?) The weak link is the film’s dramatisation of the theft: a tongue-in-cheek pastiche that feels a bit glib as questions about the Alters’ motivations deepen and darken. Still, the film offers a fascinating glimpse into the mystery of other people, especially other people’s marriages. Friends and family still look dazed that the Alters – Rita and Jerry! – were behind the theft.
The unlikely heroes of the story are a trio of honest-as-they-come house clearance men who bought the De Kooning along with the contents of Jerry and Rita’s house after they died. When a customer offered them $200,000 for the painting, they did a bit of Googling; after realising it could be the missing artwork (Woman-Ochre, now worth around $160m), they were straight on the phone to the gallery in Arizona to return it, with no question of making a dime for themselves.
The three men are brilliant interviewees, warm and thoroughly decent; their experience in rooting through other people’s homes and lives has clearly given them the kind of insight that would make them great detectives, too. And if nothing else, this documentary ought to give someone working in television the idea of making a detective series about house clearance experts.
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Art
Is AI art the new frontier or just another way to rip artists off? Watch episode 1 of digi-Art now – CBC.ca
AI: Artificial Intelligence
Duration 14:15
Artificial Intelligence: it thinks like us, writes like us – but can it create art like us? Dive into the latest buzz to unpack if AI is a helpful collaborator or just thieving competition.
CBC Arts’ new series digi-Art looks to the horizon to see what’s possible with tech and art — charting a course led by creatives and innovators towards new worlds and ways of creating.
The infinite monkey theorem posits that if a countless number of monkeys were assembled in front of a limitless number of typewriters, they would eventually create writing as revered and dense as the works of William Shakespeare.
The theorem feels unimaginable and creative works are so often seen as intentional — great writing and designs can’t just be shaped from nothing. But recent trends in AI seem set to transform how the creation of art is viewed in culture.
AI art has been all over the Internet, and even winning awards, and it’s leading some visual artists to worry about their roles in the future.
Text-to-image systems, like DALL-E 2, have been enabling anyone to create striking visual works with just a few words. People can now truly create something from almost nothing. But, this process isn’t as random as it seems.
Dr. Alexis Morris is the tier two research chair in the Internet of Things at OCAD University. He told digi-Art host Taelor Lewis-Joseph about a process called “classification” — the process by which a machine can turn language to a thing, and then ultimately an image.
“You show the machine an image of a cat, but it doesn’t know what a cat is,” Morris says. “You give it lots of pictures of cats and after a time, it starts to learn that cats are often a little fuzzy and have pointed ears.”
“As you give it more and more pictures, the machine figures out more and more features.”
Through being exposed to countless images, AI can begin to generate sometimes startlingly realistic images from almost nothing.
Intelligence stealing art
While AI technology is groundbreaking, not all creatives are excited by its prospects in the art world.
Mark Gagne is a multimedia artist and head of Mindmelt Studio. He’s no stranger to using technology in his art — Gagne will often mix together illustrations and photography in his pieces.
But he has grown frustrated with what he views as AI’s continued encroachment on original pieces of art.
“These AI programs are scraping artwork off the internet, including my own, and Frankensteining them into a piece of artwork,” Gagne says. “It really upset me that I was one of those artists that got scraped up by the AI apps.”
Gagne’s frustration with AI platforms has been increased by the fact that he considers his work to be very personal to him. His work often explores topics like mental health.
“People … [identified] with the imagery that I was putting out and it really opened dialogue with a lot of people,” he says. “They found that my art page was a safe space for them to express that.”
What started as personal expression has now been “regurgitated” by AI platforms, Gagne argues. “It’s kind of like when somebody breaks into your home and takes off with your television or your PlayStation or something,” he says.
“I mean, the technology’s amazing, but what’s wrong with these companies coming to the artists and saying, ‘We’d like to work with you?'”
Taking advantage of AI
While some artists are worried about AI, some are embracing it. Waxhead is an artist who began in a more analogue medium — street art.
But now, Waxhead said that AI is taking an active role in his creations. In fact, AI has helped to inform the art he creates in the physical world.
“I’m using AI in a wide variety of ways as a tool to create seamless textures for 3D models, to create reference material for my murals, to create references for paintings,” he says. “It just allowed me to be creative and to learn and renew a love for learning.”
Waxhead’s experiments with AI have allowed him to manipulate some of his favourite styles of art. He says that AI allows styles of art to be reiterated.
“I’m starting to build models that are referencing my art, so I’m using hundreds and hundreds of photographs of years and years and years of my work to make something that’s my style, that’s Waxhead, but also created by AI,” he says.
While he acknowledges the problems other artists have had with their art being scooped up by AI platforms, he also thinks that this cycle is reflective of art more broadly.
“I think humans have always used other artwork as references and we’re all taking our inspirations from somewhere,” he says.
“Things are changing extremely fast … I’m excited about the future, using AI, using text prompts. What concerns me is who controls these models.”
“I think more open-source AI models that are controlled by the public, in terms of art and creativity, are gonna have vastly more amazing applications in general.”
CBC Arts’ new series digi-Art looks to the horizon to see what’s possible with tech and art — charting a course led by creatives and innovators towards new worlds and ways of creating.
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