Strains of smooth jazz tickle your ears as you walk up the stairs to the first-floor studio of artist, Yaw Ofosu Safori in a big white building at Oyarifa in the Ga East Municipal district.
The reality is that music does not only fill Safori’s work space. It prominently inhabits his canvases. So there are solo instrumentalists and singers as well as duos, trios, quartets and big bands.
There are musicians, both men and women in a variety of postures, all caught in the ecstasy of making music.
“I love music. I listen to all kinds of it but jazz is my favourite,” says the self-taught artist who has relocated back to Ghana after living and working in the United States for over two decades.
“An artist’s output tends to reflect what is on his mind a lot of the time. Music reverberates in a great deal of my stuff because it never leaves my mind.
I present it in all kinds of ways. Sometimes, it is so abstract people need to observe critically to catch what is going on.”
Growing up at Akropong in the Eastern Region where he was born and had his basic education, Safori was obviously aware of all the popular music, both local and foreign, that floated around him
He became aware of American jazz acts like Crusaders, Randy Crawford, Joe Sample and Grover Washington during his time at Okuapeman Secondary School in Akropong and Accra Academy where he finished Sixth Form in 1987.
By the time he left these shores for the United Kingdom en route to the US in 1989, he felt excited about all the music he could hear in his new surroundings.
Art was just a hobby for him. A customer in a San Francisco shop he worked saw something he had produced and mentioned it to the store manager.All the paintings sold out when he was allowed by his superior to show his work in the shop.
He resigned and took up art full time after that. He prides himself on developing invaluable relationships with clients who bought multiple pieces at a time.
He has, over the years, been commissioned by dignitaries and major corporate institutions, to produce some of his distinctive work for them.
“I have been focused since I started devoting all my time to art. I let the art speak for itself,” says Safori who participated in the prestigious New York Art Expo in 2011.
Alongside his current collection of over 5,000 CDs by jazz musicians of all shades, is a huge volume of paintings that vividly portray his sense of colour as well as incorporation of text and symbology.
The thrill of his life as an artist derives a lot from the amount of music that ooze from his canvases, some of which are depicted in ways that can only be described as his own.
His unique approaches include saxophones that look like ‘mmenson’ horns and bare-breasted, long-necked and red-lipped women blissfully playing instruments.
“I strongly believe in individuality. What I bring to art is different from what people are used to. Perhaps, if I had studied formally in a college or under somebody, I would have been doing things the way my professors or instructors did their things.
“I always imagine and create in a way that would not be like grabbing a camera and taking a picture of somebody or some people. I love to do things my own way that cover different aspects of art.”
Safori works in a variety of media including acrylic, pastel, charcoal and water colour. What, however, seizes the eye in a lot of his work is his love for bright colours. Despite that, he is also extremely imaginative with dull tones.
“If you are able to co-ordinate your colours well for whatever you are doing, they look really good.
Through work experience, I have learned a lot about colour co-ordination. You cannot just put in colours because you have them.”
To Safori, everything is about creating and selling art and he’s so far having a good time doing that.
He is quick to point out, however, that his scope is much wider than music and he tackles a broad range of themes as well.
Apart from painting, he also stretches his imagination to textile and furniture design as well as photography.
Some of his paintings will be on show from 6.00pm in the Django Bar at Rockstone’s Office in Accra on Thursday, May 5.
