Anthony Azekwoh

I started with writing.

Growing up, I was always making stories. My English teacher, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, showed me early on what language could do, and by secondary school I was writing constantly: fiction, essays, anything that could hold the things I saw in my head.

Then my laptop broke.

I couldn't afford to fix it, so I picked up some leftover pens and A4 paper at home and started drawing instead. It wasn't a grand career decision. I just needed another way to make something.

Eventually, I taught myself to paint with a mouse in Photoshop. I studied artists like Jacques-Louis David and Norman Rockwell, and began pulling what I learned toward the stories I knew: African folklore, mythology, religion, Lagos, and the people around me.

Writing and painting have always felt like the same practice to me. One uses sentences. The other uses faces, colour, light, and form.

I left Chemical Engineering at Covenant University in 2021 to work as an artist full-time.

Since then, my work has been shown in Lagos, Abuja, London, New York, Tokyo, and Denver. No Victor, No Vanquished entered the permanent collection of the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art at Pan-Atlantic University. In 2025, I made The Wedding, a cast of characters built across twenty-four portraits and sculpture.

I also write books, make sculptures, and build larger fictional worlds around the work.

Digital painting remains at the centre of my practice because it is where I learned to paint. I have never seen it as a substitute for a more legitimate medium. It is simply my medium.

Stories have always travelled through whatever people had available to them: voices, walls, bronze, paper, film, screens.

I am interested in what happens when the stories I grew up with are given that same scale, attention, and permanence.

Most of what I make now is part of one growing world.

Lagos is usually somewhere inside it.