Artwork By Abiodun Anako Is Available At Gallery 319, Ames, Iowa.
"I am a painter. I paint with acrylics on rice paper, mixed media on canvas, and I have developed a kind of wax batik on rice paper. As an artist I have exhibited my art in Nigeria, Germany, and the USA.
I was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. I had my primary education in Ibadan, also my secondary and higher institution education in Ibadan. For my national youth service I was posted to Kwara State. After that, I started working at a couple of jobs and marketing my work. It is very hard living on art alone. You have to move out to different work to make a living. It is quite frustrating. You can't keep producing when there is no place to push the works. Sometimes you just keep producing works but at the end of the day you look at them and people are not coming to buy and there is no place to push them to. You have to buy materials and you don't have what you need to have a good life.
I am in my mid-forties. I have been an artist all my life. When I was a child I used clay to mold and drew with pencils. My father, a civil servant, discouraged me all his life before he turned to business after retirement. He never saw anything coming out of art. He tried as much as he could to turn me to the sciences. I don't like them. I tried to stick to the arts and I got the best grades in art with low marks in other subjects. My mother didn't mind, she let me do anything I wanted to do. She encouraged me in my art life. She helped me set up my first studio. I used to solicit some school days, when treating math and other subjects I would be drawing in my exercise books and at the end of the day when they called on me I didn't know the answers. From there I proceeded to secondary school and in an art competition for the whole school, I was second. From there I discovered that it would be better for me to go to art rather than science. They used to call us lazy students because they thought all art was to draw and paint. But art has a lot to do with nature and thinking. You just have to sit down and think about the environment or past lives, about some people and the way you can bring it down to your canvas, your paper, or your board. There is joy in arts."
