The Surface Must Be Ready First
By Oluwafemi Akanmu
There is a piece Akanmu sold around 2022 that he still thinks about. He described it in terms of loss — things you believe are gone for good, fragments of yourself you write off, and then, without explanation, recover. He put that experience directly into the painting. A collector bought it, and Akanmu said what drew the person in was the story. "There are some little pieces of ourselves that we lost a long time ago that we think we cannot get again," he told me. "But miraculously, we just find ourselves getting it back." The painting carried a mask at its center — planned from the start, unchanged by the process. Everything around it shifted. The mask held.
Oluwafemi Akanmu is thirty-two years old and works out of Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria. He grew up in Ogbomoso, in Oyo State, and trained at what is now Emmanuel Alayande University of Education, where he studied Fine and Applied Arts and earned a National Certificate in Education. He also spent time as a studio assistant at Raph Basic Art Studio — less formal than the classroom, more instructive in practice. He works primarily in charcoal and acrylic on canvas, sometimes running three or four pieces simultaneously, moving between them as his focus shifts.
The canvas preparation comes before everything else. Akanmu is precise about this: the surface has to be coated, stress-tested, and sanded before painting begins. He learned the coating technique in his second year at art school from a senior who walked him through how to treat canvas so it would not crack after the work was finished. He has used the same basic method since. When I suggested that surface prep sounded like half the job, he agreed without hesitation. "The surface must be very, very ready before artists can start painting," he said. "Because if the surface is rough, definitely the work will not come out very well." After coating, he proof-tests the canvas — physically stressing it to check for weakness — then sands it down to a clean, even plane before the first mark goes down. After shipping, the only issue he encounters is dust settling on the surface; he cleans it before the piece goes out. Beyond that, once the coating is set, it holds.
The technical challenge with charcoal on canvas is blending. Acrylic is forgiving in ways charcoal is not, and the two materials do not naturally cooperate on a prepared surface. Akanmu described the process as gradual, something that requires patience rather than force. Before that senior's advice in art school, he had been losing work to surface failure. After it, the problem was solved, and the coating sequence — preparation, proof test, sandpaper, paint — became the fixed architecture of every piece that followed.
His current series is called I Deserve a Crown. At the time of our conversation, he had completed one piece in the series and was mid-way through a second, working on the figure's clothing before returning to the face and then the background pattern. He had been on the series for three to four weeks, slowed partly by the recent birth of his first daughter. He expected to be back in the studio soon. The background patterns, he said, he does not plan. They come while he is working. "I don't know what will come until I get to that stage," he said.
That approach — no pre-mapped composition, patterns arrived at in the moment — runs through most of what he makes. Echoes of Identity, which Akanmu named as the piece that most clearly shows his shift from traditional patterning into a contemporary visual language, is a head rendered in black and white acrylic against an orange background. Pattern fills the interior of the face — around the eyes, the hair, the nose — but the background pattern is not African in origin; it is, as Akanmu put it, a modern pattern. The whole canvas is organized around that tension: a recognizably African subject rendered through a hybrid visual grammar. The patterns inside the head were not sketched out in advance. They came as he painted. The work took three weeks, and it told him when to stop late rather than early.
The habit of working on multiple canvases at once is not about productivity. It is about sustaining attention. When interest in one piece drops, he moves to another rather than forcing through it, then comes back. The shift is emotional as much as practical — a change in mood, a need for a different problem to solve. He described losing interest not as failure but as information: the work is telling him it needs time, not more paint.
His formal training introduced him to traditional indigenous approaches — African motifs and patterning as a foundation. What he has done since is adapt that foundation rather than preserve it. He described needing to shift those patterns into what he called a modern way of design — still rooted in the same source material, but reworked into a contemporary visual language. The distinction matters to him. The patterns in his work are not quotations from a tradition; they are something he has made from it. Echoes of Identity is the clearest demonstration of that negotiation: the African motif is present in the structure of the face, but the background and the internal patterning have been pulled into a different register entirely.
The exhibition record over the past few years covers a range of contexts. In 2022, Akanmu showed in the National Art in Health Week in Nigeria and participated in an international online challenge organized by the Mukhote Creative Art Foundation in India. That same year, two works appeared on Artsy through Constance and Sons Gallery: Fashion, An Instant Language and Forgotten Identity. In 2023, he showed at the Life in My City Festival in Ibadan, reached the international level of the LevelUp drawing competition, and exhibited in the No Limits International Art Exhibition organized by Golden Duck Gallery. In 2024, Harmer Gallery included him in its spring exhibition, Melody of Hope. Most recently, in 2025, his work appeared in Irinajoeda: The journey of human life at the National Museum of Unity in Ibadan — a national institution, and the most formally significant venue in the sequence so far.
The Irinajoeda exhibition is worth pausing on. The show's title points to the arc of a human life, and the museum's setting in Ibadan — a city with deep historical weight in Yoruba cultural life — gave the work a context that online platforms cannot replicate. For Akanmu, who has built much of his early audience through Artsy and social media, showing in a national museum represented a different kind of accountability: a physical audience, a permanent institution, a record that exists outside an algorithm.
Finishing, for Akanmu, is not a technical determination. He described it as a feeling, one that belongs to the artist and the work and does not translate easily into criteria. He said plainly that no artwork is ever finished, but that a feeling arrives when it is time to stop — and that feeling is between the artist and the work alone. When it comes, he signs the piece. After signing, he photographs it — first a full front view, then angles. The angle shots matter to him. He wants people who see the work online to understand the thickness of the surface, the physical weight of the paint and charcoal, the texture they would feel standing in front of it. He described wanting viewers to see the hard work, to have a sense of it even without physical access to the piece.
That concern with viewpoint extends to how he thinks about gallery presentation. Different angles produce different readings. A viewer approaching from the side sees something the person standing directly in front of it misses. He was not prescriptive about what those readings should be — the point is that the work opens rather than closes depending on where you stand.
The themes he keeps returning to — identity, resilience, the interior life of figures, the weight of what people carry without showing it — come from observation as much as from any formal program. He grew up watching the people around him, and that watching shaped what he reaches for in the studio. His figures tend to hold something back. The mask in that 2022 piece was not incidental.
"It's the story," he said. "The story really, really touches."
Discover more of Oluwafemi Akanmu's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.