Professor Ablade Glover, Director of the Artists Alliance Gallery has encouraged young artists to paint rather than rely solely on computers to create art.
Prof Glover who is also a Painter explained that computers were taking the creativity out of students, adding that art comes from the heart and cannot be created from a machine.
“A machine is supposed to help us by making our work easier and not us helping the machine” he said.
Prof. Glover made these statements at the “night of the arts”, an event organised by Mrs. Demay Alabi, Chief Executive, in collaboration with the National Theatre, Ghana Association of Writers (GAW), Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, held every two months to give people in the arts an opportunity to showcase their works and to help inculcate an appreciation for the arts in Ghanaians.
This month’s night was to celebrate the life and works of Prof. Glover.
He also bemoaned young artists’ perception that they should paint for a target audience in order for their paintings to sell and urged them to paint for themselves instead and then people would pay for them.
Prof. Glover also advised the youth to do what they love and not what others expect them to do.
When asked why he portrays women in most of his paintings, he explained that the strength of Ghana’s culture lay in women. “women are very strong, they hold our culture” he said, giving an example of a woman carrying a child on her back, a load on her head and still being able to beat a man to getting into a ‘trotro’(public transport).
Mrs. Demay Alabi, the lead organiser of ‘night of the arts with Demay’ said the theme for the night -“African arts; key to our culture” had been chosen because the development and freedom of the nation and the continent lied in the arts and literature.
“It gives free, real expression to our being and our minds, which is the cradle of innovation” she said.
She stated that creativity was the bedrock of human development and that Africa should consider the place and value of the arts if it should advance and gain recognition in the global world.
Mrs Alabi bemoaned the fact that Ghana was focused on developing infrastructure instead of developing its human resources especially in the arts, thus the inability of most Ghanaians to appreciate art in all its forms including painting, poetry, music, choreography and literature.
She appealed to the public and stakeholders in the arts industry to support efforts aimed at outdooring, celebrating and growing African arts.