Anthony Azekwoh

I grew up surrounded by stories. My English teacher, the writer Kola Tubosun, showed me what words could do. By secondary school, I was writing constantly. Fiction, essays, anything to capture what I saw in my head.

Then my laptop broke. No money to fix it. So I picked up leftover pens and A4 paper from my parents' house and started drawing. It wasn't a pivot. It was survival. But somewhere in those early sketches, I found a new dialect for the same language.

I taught myself how to draw with a mouse on Photoshop. Studied the neoclassical painters, Jacque-Louis David, Norman Rockwell, and fused their technique with the mythology I'd grown up hearing. African folklore, Yoruba cosmology, stories of gods and mortals. I wanted to paint the worlds I'd only ever heard about.

The technique is inseparable from the philosophy. Every painting carries the texture of survival: cracked, layered, patinated. Not as aesthetic choice but as argument. The surface says: this has endured. This was always here. You just were not shown it.

In 2021, I dropped out of Chemical Engineering at Covenant University to commit to the work full-time. Since then: eight solo exhibitions in Lagos and Abuja. No Victor, No Vanquished in the permanent collection of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University. The first digital painting the museum has acquired. THE WEDDING in 2025, twenty-four portraits and three marble sculptures, the largest body I've ever staged. Works held by Tunji Balogun, Cynthia Erivo, PleasrDAO. Five books, including Ṣàngó and Oya on a US imprint. Three volumes of Afrodigital on SuperRare. Building the platform that didn't exist when I needed one. Finalist for the 2025 Chizi Wigwe Prize for African Futurism.

Digital is not a workaround. It is the answer. The griot's craft was always to carry the story by the lightest possible vehicle, mouth to ear, generation to generation, village to village. Each civilisation builds its archive in the medium of its time. Manuscripts. Frescoes. Bronze. Oil. Print. Pixel. The screen is where my generation lives, where the diaspora finds itself, where a boy in Lagos and a girl in Brooklyn read the same myth the same morning. African mythology was never meant to live behind glass. It was always meant to travel. Digital is the medium that travels furthest. That is why I still work in it.

I grew up surrounded by stories. The next generation will grow up surrounded by mine.