Needs must.
Old habits die hard: when I was a teen I was preoccupied with oil crayon drawing images of my two sartorial idols, Grace Jones and David Bowie. I lost the bulk of my teen output in a fire… Fast forward decades later, the pastels have been replaced with mouse / cursor / AI and a ton of art direction. It’s still Bowie, and Ms. Jones (and all her legacy iterations: Ajak Deng, Grace Bol, et ...
Sketches for Untitled Kingdom Volume IV: “Literary & Debating Society”, an episode in which the girls at the orphanage fortuitously receive the wrong uniforms, instead of the ones ordered for them at the behest of the First Lady. The backstory: the orphan schoolgirls have now figured out how to wield certain forest magic elements in their favour, and set about to end their isolation and ...
I used a fairly straightforward reference image of myself at the TWA Lounge (JFK), peppered in some psychedelia prompts in Midjourney that matched the era and ended up with these:
Some AI sketches for the Late Great Dame. A long time ago I had a dream where I sat behind Elizabeth the First, among a college of priestesses (sort of arranged like a choir behind the preacher)—so I couldn’t exactly see her. Later on in the dream, a friend who appeared as a high ranking gentleman, guided me through a crowded hotel lobby to meet her. She sat in a frosted phone booth, a ...
This is pure vicarious projection. Despite my aspirations, my NYE was fairly tame, spent in the Alps amongst friends. I did sort of get stoned by the altitude and forest trees on a hike earlier in the day. Rendered me unable to drink.
It’s always Fashion Week in the Realm of the Spirits. The entire spectrum of animal existence blends together and synthesizes: this is true meaning of couture.
As a teenager, nothing gave me more pleasure than painting portraits of my two heroes: Grace Jones and David Bowie. The habit has resuscitated itself as of late, and I find myself exploring the Kabuki aspects of Ziggy Stardust… with some Weimar-era cabaret thrown in for good measure.
As kids, back in Nigeria, sometimes we’d go strolling with my aunt in the evenings to get nocturnal treats, roadside cornucopia of roast corn, plantains, akara, suya from food vendors lining the night streets with large vats of oil, burning coal pits, aromas intoxicating and magical… My aunt sternly warned us not to stare at people because not everyone at the Night Market was ...
Fly Nigeria: A jade suite for Nigerian Independence Day.
The iconic West African magazine, Drum, which shuttered sometime in the ’80s, revived to take a look at Nigeria at 62.
A few character sketches for the graphic novel “Untitled Kingdom” set in a Biafran war orphanage hidden in the midst of the Bayelsa Forest.