What the Cape Coast Taught Me About Colour

I grew up where the Atlantic still carries the memory of departure. The Cape Coast is a place of castles and ghosts, but it is also a place of impossible brightness — kente at a funeral, a fishing boat painted every colour at once, a Sunday dress that could light a room.

That refusal to be only one thing is the thing I most want my paintings to carry. Western training taught me that serious art is restrained, muted, grey. The coast taught me that grief and celebration can share a single frame, that bright is not the same as shallow.

So I paint the fishermen in greens that hum, the market woman against a yellow that will not apologise. I am trying to paint contemporary African life without flattening it into either suffering or spectacle — because it has always, stubbornly, been both at once.