Art is a Journey

Abstract

‘I’m like a painter that’s got so many hidden secrets’, Ben Okri once said about himself in an interview. This observation was meant to underline the fact that his work contained ‘details, many of which you are not going to see the first three times you read it’ (2012a: 106). But anyone acquainted with the Nigerian author’s writing will recognize the wider significance of the comparison too. The connections between Okri’s work and the art of painting are indeed numerous. To cite but a few, his 2002 novel, In Arcadia, features as a central motif Nicolas Poussin’s oil on canvas Les Bergers d’Arcadie, an image used as a stepping-stone to the exploration of wider themes such as man’s everlasting quest for happiness. His 2012 collection of poems Wild contains a piece written ‘After Velasquez’ (2012b: 75), which more specifically muses on the Spanish artist’s painting of Venus gazing into a mirror. Even more recently, in 2013, Okri wrote a poem entitled ‘Diallo’s Testament’, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London and inspired by William Hoare’s painting of the former slave Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Okri, 2013).