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Felix Armah Arkutu

"I discovered my vocation as an artist at age nine, by which time I was already assisting as studio boy to Mr. Nyarko, a painter, sign writer, and portrait artist. From then on the natural desire to paint has been with me. In fact, it has become a lifetime commitment for me.

"I was born on the 9 of March in 1969, at Legon, a suburb of Accra, the capital of Ghana. At the age of four I was enrolled at the Datus Preparatory School in Accra, where I benefited from Primary Education up to class six. In 1981, I successfully passed the difficult Common Entrance Examination, and gained admission into the Mawuli School, in the Volta Region, to read for the Ordinary and Advanced Level Certificates of Education. During my seven years stay at Mawuli, I twice won the highest award for outstanding performance in Fine Arts. Then, I gained admission in 1990 to the University of Science and Technology (UST) at Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region. After a four-year program at the College of Art-UST, I obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree with second honors.

"As a professional artist, I have exhibited at several of the Pan-African Historical Theatre Festivals (including PANAFEST 94 and PANAFEST 97). I was also invited in 1998 to participate in an exhibition sponsored by the European Community together with the College of Art-UST, Kumasi. The theme was 'The European Community Seen through the eyes of Ghana'. In August 1996 and April 1998 I exhibited my work at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Accra, and, since then, I have also participated in several group exhibitions.

"My color imagery is filled with cultural symbolism and upright figures. I synthesize my ideas into interesting visual phrases. With the use of the palette knife and paintbrush, I work with graphic simplicity. Colorful silhouettes suddenly thrust themselves into view. Dark lines cut across luminous fields of color. A tactile, sensual quality and a refined smoothness possess my work. I'm an expressionist painter, I work in the language of feeling. My work is purely aesthetic, aimed at projecting the rich and colorful heritage of Ghanaian cultures.

"My themes in painting range from seascapes, landscapes, traditional Ghanaian forms and costumes to purely colorist works. My purely colorist or abstract painting means that real objects in nature have been either subdued or entirely disregarded. The aesthetic content of these works are expressed rather in formal patterns of shape, lines, rhythm and texture. Sometimes, the subject is real but so blurred, repeated or broken down into such basic forms that the recognition of natural shapes becomes difficult. The result is usually an interesting orchestration of color, motifs, rhythm and texture.

"I am armed with only one truth: Beauty. My works reflect their quality vertically, and undoubtedly stand tall in Ghanaian painting and reach international levels with consistency."