The Mystery of The Alley At Ayigya

Well! If this sounds like an Agatha Christie Whodunit, it probably is…  to me anyway!

I often wonder what happens to my paintings when they leave my studio, and even though I’ve kept in touch with a few buyers who are now valuable collectors, I don’t think I was prepared for the message that landed in my inbox a couple of weeks ago.

It was from a young student, well I imagine he is young even though I’ve never met him. 
“ Hello” he began, “I am a student at Rhode Island School Of Design, and am currently doing a project in which I will be creating a placard for one of your works ‘Alley At Agigya [sic]’ 1982… if you have some time would you be able to provide a little bit of background for the painting…?”  

‘Alley At Ayigya!’ (pronounced Ayija), My goodness! What a trawl back to a past I hadn’t thought much about in a long long time! After all it was all of forty years ago and I was a 21 or 22 year old art student! The memories came flooding back thick and fast as though it were yesterday. I remember in detail when and how that painting came about, and yet I have no recollection at all of what happened to it after I painted it or how it came to be in the US, or why it was now one of the subjects of a class called Curating The Modern: Modernis (sp?) at RISD. I had so many questions!

I fired back my reply immediately “Hello… thanks for your message! Gosh what a blast from the past! Do you have an image of the painting? How did you come to know of it? It was one of my student pieces from when I was at the College of Art [KNUST]  in Ghana. 1982 means I was in my second or third year… I’d be able to tell you more about it… It’s ‘Alley at AYIGYA’ by the way…”

And so continued our dialogue, “Hi Anne, thanks for getting back to me so quickly… I don’t currently have a picture… I can send you one this Thursday… I came to know of it through my Professor… for a class called Curating the Modern: Modernis(m?) at RISD… I’m so excited to learn more about it…”

”Thanks so much… if I recall, it’s a watercolour piece I did en plein air, we used to go out as a class to paint outdoors…, there was a lot of political unrest…, clashes between students and government…, the university closed for an entire year…, I was happy…. I was relatively carefree… “

It’s amazing how certain situations like sights, sounds or even smells evoke certain memories. The title alone had got me going but it wasn’t until the picture of the painting landed in my inbox that I began to piece it all together - properly.

“Here’s a picture of the piece…, we’ll be putting it in a exhibition at Brown in the near future…, my Professor is very excited you responded to my message…, is interested in doing an interview with you over Zoom…, thanks so much for your response…”

”Oh my word”, I wrote back, “my head is really spinning with memories…, that’s an oil painting…, the original sketch was done in water colour en plein air (we didn’t call it that in those days, I think we called it field painting)…”

Ayigya is a small village a short walking distance from College Of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology where I studied Fine Art from 1979/80 through 1983/84. As students we spent a bit of our time there doing field drawing and water colour sketches which we brought back to the studio to complete our larger oil paintings. 

It wasn’t just the memory of the man, drunk and half asleep, trying to balance on an incline, or the little boy with the pot belly who wandered off to find a toilet, or so he told his mother when she called him back, it was also the memory of the small plank of wood that made up the makeshift footbridge and the artist Isaac Levitan who influenced my work then, and to an extent, now. The school library at my secondary school had a load of books on Levitan and I spent hours poring over these.

Art materials were scarce and expensive and that is pretty much where most of our grants went. We made our own canvas stretchers out of cheap wawa softwood, and helped each other stretch them, we didn’t have stretcher pliers, just our thumbs and a box of tacks and a small hammer, one person would pull and stretch, the other would tack and hammer. That’s how it worked. For canvas, we used whatever bits of board we found, plywood, MDF, chipboard, or whatever thick fabric we could lay our hands on - often White Drill fabric  (used for making school uniforms) from the market. For ‘Alley At Ayigya’, I ripped up a thick cotton bedsheet. We had learned a good emulsion paint with a good glue content would make a good primer. If we ever run out of Titanium white paint, we used household oil paint. That’s just how we rolled.

So forty years later and ‘Alley At Ayigya’, created in Ghana, has surfaced in Rhode Island, USA. The image looks like it’s been in some kind of storage. Where has it been all this time and how did it get to the US? I am intrigued and want to know more but for now I am really looking forward to the Zoom interview. If they have any questions for me, I am pretty sure I have more to ask. Loads more…

Do you often wonder where your paintings are, what sort of questions would you ask in a situation like this? Do please share your comments with me below ⬇️.


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