Box by Box, Shade by Shade
By Olamilekan Okunade
The detail that nearly broke a recent painting was a shade of yellow. Olamilekan Okunade had imagined a woman in a grey suit, seated in an office surrounded by a library, a laptop open on the desk in front of her. He knew from the start that he didn't want the shirt beneath her jacket to be white. White was too expected. So he tried yellow, and for a while the yellow refused to cooperate. It clashed with the grey of the suit and the shadows he was laying in to give the fabric its weight. He kept adjusting the tone, pulling it toward peach, until finally it settled. He squinted at the canvas, stepped back, and saw that the peach harmonized with the whole work.
Squinting is a recurring word in Okunade's vocabulary, and not a casual one. It describes a specific act: stepping back from the canvas, narrowing his eyes, and reading the painting as a whole rather than as a collection of parts. He does it constantly. When a passage isn't working, he steps back and squints. When he thinks it might be done, he squints again. He also photographs the canvas on his phone, which gives him a different frame and a different scale. If a highlight looks too pronounced on the screen, he glazes over it with a thin layer of the same color beneath it, calming the tone without changing the shape. He described this process with the patience of someone who has done it hundreds of times and still finds it interesting.
His method is called Pixelating Geometrics, a term he uses to describe painting composed entirely of rectangular blocks of color laid side by side. There are no blended gradients in the conventional sense. Instead, he builds tone through adjacency: a dark purple next to an orange next to a yellow, and the eye does the blending. The approach requires a precise understanding of how colors behave next to each other, which is something he traces back to his training in Fine and Applied Arts at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Ogbomoso, where he graduated in 2017. Color theory, he said, is the one thing from his formal education he has never had to revise. What he did revise was the insistence on accuracy that the program drilled into him. "You don't need to be perfect to stand out as an artist," he told me, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who figured this out through practice rather than being told. The business side of art was also not on the curriculum. He learned that separately, on his own, and mentions the gap without bitterness — more as a practical observation about what art schools in Nigeria do and don't prepare their students for.
The painting with the tech lady and the library is among the works that have drawn the most attention from viewers at open studios. Okunade described inviting people in to see the work and watching them point at details he had placed without much deliberation: a flower behind the bookshelf, a picture frame, an award on the wall, a map of Africa rendered in a circular form in the background, a window implying a world outside the office. "I don't even take note of it," he said. "But they are the ones pointing at all those things that caught their attention." He seemed genuinely pleased by this, not because the details validated him, but because they confirmed something he believes about painting: that what a viewer notices depends on who they are. Someone drawn to technology looks at the laptop. Someone drawn to academics looks at the books. A geographer notices the map of Africa. Okunade said he looks at the figure first, then the library, then the whole thing as a rhythm.
The library itself cost him a full day. His style means that a bookshelf is not painted as a bookshelf but as hundreds of individual rectangular blocks, each one a slightly different shade, arranged so that together they read as depth, light, and the specific texture of books packed onto shelves. Getting the colors to harmonize across that many individual marks, in a composition already working in a dark register, was the hardest technical problem in the piece. The breakthrough came from a shade of orange that wouldn't settle. He resolved it by working red into the lower edges of the book spines and yellow into the upper edges, letting the orange emerge from the transition between them. Once that worked, the rest of the library followed.
The lamp in the background was not planned. He added it after the rest of the work was finished, because he wanted to create the illusion of light falling on the books from somewhere. "Anytime I'm working, I talk to myself just to make it through," he explained. He described composing most of his paintings without preliminary sketches, building them from an image in his head and then talking himself through the decisions as he paints. The lamp came from one of those internal conversations: what does this scene need to convince a viewer that this woman exists in this room?
That painting belongs to a body of work anchored in a specific subject: the women around him. Okunade was raised by a single mother in Lagos State, and his artist statement frames everything that followed as a consequence of that fact — the sacrifices he watched, the perseverance, the particular texture of an African upbringing shaped by a woman doing it alone. His paintings of women in offices, in traditional dress, in moments of stillness, are not illustrations of that biography so much as extensions of it. The figure in the tech-lady painting — her African hairstyle, her grey suit, her posture at the desk — carries that weight without announcing it.
Okunade is 38 and has been working as a full-time studio artist since graduating. He is based in Oyo State. His exhibition record spans a wide range of contexts: the Suzhou Expo in China in 2021, the MoDhafest Art in Healing Exhibition in the United States in 2022, and a solo show titled Bloom and Essence at the British Council in Ikoyi, Lagos, in November 2025, covered by The Guardian Nigeria. That same month he showed in Unity Renewed, a group exhibition at the National Museum of Unity in Ibadan. At the +234 Art Fair in Lagos in 2024, he sold six works. These are not the exhibitions of an artist building toward a first public moment. He has been in front of audiences for years.
His recent series includes works titled Heritage of Becoming — two large canvases completed in 2026, both acrylic on canvas, both operating in a dark color scheme that pushes the Pixelating Geometrics method to its limit. Dark shades that are too similar collapse into mud; shades that are too different break the surface apart. "I have to play with the different shades of colors that are dark, and they have to still harmonize together and still give me what I want," he said. He described squinting at these canvases more than any others. The background of Heritage of Becoming — a library rendered box by box in near-black tones — was the passage that took the most from him. He said he skilled through it. The phrase landed plainly, without drama, which is how he tends to describe difficulty.
The next project he described is a painting of flowers, drawn from a personal experience he didn't specify. The challenge he has been turning over in his mind is technical: how do you render a flower using only rectangular blocks? He has not started yet. He knows he will begin with the darkest part of the flower, probably a dark purple, and graduate upward through orange to yellow to the highlights. He plans to paint the seeds, because most people who paint flowers leave the seeds out, and the seeds are what make the thing convincing. The leaves will go in last, each one built as a triangle blocked in with green, then highlighted, then glazed back if the highlight reads as too bright. He will check the vein of each leaf up close, then step back, then look at it on his phone. When it's done, he will invite people to the studio.
When they come, they will say things he didn't expect, point at marks he made without thinking. He will ask how they feel about the work overall, and he will listen to what they debate among themselves. Some of it he will act on. Some of it he will leave. Then he will sign the canvas at the lower right, in a color chosen to sit between visible and unobtrusive — present, but not competing with the painting itself. "Once I find myself in the painting," he said, "definitely my audience will comply and flow with my idea."
Discover more of Olamilekan Okunade's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.