Talented Visual Artist, Derek Jumbo Ogbei, talks about his outstanding work of Art, when he first picked up his painting brush, and what his journey as a visual artist is like.
A visual artist creates works of art using a variety of materials. As a visual artist, your duties may be to draw images, work with paint, develop murals, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, and crafts.
According to Derek, his medium of expression ranges from paint down to sound. he shared that one of his studio is in the heart of Benin City and the area has a lot of sound which leads and guide his creative process.
Do you have any models for your pieces?
I have pieces of my mum and aunt they actually come seat down for me but in modern day, people cant seat for long so what we do is we take the post photograph then i mix the the skin tone from life.
Tell us why most of your works are mostly with ‘long necks’?
These ‘long Necks’ if thats what you see them as are not a style or another version of me i am exploring. As oppose to working from doing natural figures which people can almost say you can actually take a photograph and do that.
When you move from doing things so naturally and you study and practice, something in you will want to explore.
You don’t force it but it just happen and while i was in my studio that series of work just kept coming so i just started blowing up the neck.
I blew up the neck starting with females most especially because it was more of their adventurous necks and confident gaze.
Is there any particular reason why your works are mostly women?
I’m currently working on men but for now i concentrate on women because just like we have animals in the wild, you have elephant, giraffe with longer necks that can reach out to grasses when its very difficult for other animals that’s how i think women are.
They can actually go through bounds, they are vert adventurous and reach out to things that basic people cant just reach and thats the power that they have.
To me i see that as beautiful and i put down a very confident gaze but then i try to portray their body and paint them to look very feminine and sexually appealing too because that is part of their nature.
All that comes together and makes them whole. I am trying to portray a woman in an exaggerated form.
See the video below for more!
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