Painting Our Stories and Legacies: Historical Evidences through Nigerian Paintings

Abstract

 One of the functions art serves is to visually document history for generations to come. Even with the development of writing, artists have continued to document various aspects of what they encounter in their various communities. In Nigeria with particular reference to painting, several artists have used their paintings as visual documentaries. The introduction of the camera as a tool for documenting did little to dissuade these painters from continuing this role. This paper, therefore, examined selected paintings of artists in Nigeria, whose works reveal historical evidence and the culture of a people. Paintings cutting across various genres such as portraits, landscape scenes, architecture, festivals, and cultural issues from pre-independence Nigeria to the present were selected for examination and analysis. The paper explores a descriptive and comparative analysis of the selected paintings vis-à-vis the various subjects they have recorded. It concludes that these paintings show significant historical evidence that can be used to reconstruct history and other aspects of society where the need may arise. Painters in Nigeria more than other artists have been able to record history with their works because of the pictorial and compositional peculiarity of painting as an art form.