After I first saw her work, I never forgot about it.  Every art piece by her that has even been exposed to me, each has their own home in one of my braincells.  I’m sure that it will live in your memory too; unless you smoke it all away, or worse.  I feel that if she created an art piece that I knew nothing about, and it was exposed to me without the name of the artist, I could say “I bet this art piece was created by Toyin Odutola!” That to me, is one of the characteristics of a great artist.

A Nigerian immigrant, Toyin moved to the south of the United States with her parents around the age of nine, and she took advantage of the opportunity.  At age twenty three, her work has been showcased in at least seven art shows, and various publications.  In 2007, she was a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship (Scholarship) upon acceptance into the Yale University Summer Art Program in Norfolk, Connecticut. She received her B.A. in Studio Art with a minor in Communication Arts at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2008.

Toyin reflects on why her family moved here, how it brought her closer to art, and how it led her to her signature drawing style:

My family’s economic survival and wanting a better life, like many immigrants throughout American history. I was just one who came around in the early 1990’s, instead of the 1900’s. It must have been scary for my parents, starting a new life here with kids, with very little money, but I was excited to start a new life in a country that I had only known up to that point to be a place of dreams exemplified by Hollywood film exports like Superman. Obviously, there were exaggerations, but I am grateful to my parents for giving my siblings and I the opportunity to make something of ourselves here, and allow us the opportunities which we would not have been attainable had we stayed in my home country.

When my family moved from the West to the South, I took to drawing random cartoon-like portraits to ease the pain of the drastic move. I never considered myself to be an artist until relatively recently, actually. I always thought what I was doing was doodling, nothing official. I admired art generally, when I was young, and was always attracted to aesthetically pleasing and on the flip side, subliminally disturbing imagery (for some odd reason), but I didn’t really take my drawings as personal expressions of “art” until late high school, through the urging of my wonderful art teacher to pursue it at university.

As I went off to study art in college, I developed an affinity for figure drawing which led to an almost perverse obsession with specific contours of the body and particular emphasis on facial portrayals. From there I focused mainly on ink, but the surfaces changed; I experimented until I arrived at what I like to call “graphically” conflicting and intentionally sensual pen and ink explorations that tend to look like muscular planes representing skin.”

Toyin then tells me how she fell in love with her current artistic signature of pen and ink:

“There is a permanence to pen and ink, that is scary and enticing to me. On the one hand, you have to be confident in your line, yet every mark you make is an experiment, a sign that can’t be easily removed. I like the idea of being able to cover a face with pen and ink marks, making the lines indelible, in a way, as if, this creation cannot be taken away.”

I always felt in my heart that the horns, ropes, and rings had a deeper meaning.  Toyin explains what they actually mean:

Hottentot, A Dancer’s Transformation, 2008

For my senior exit show, “A Colonized Mind” (2008), I wanted to explore representation of African women in portraiture. In the series, I explored sexual, religious and political renderings of African women past and present. I wanted to use a sort of motif in a few of the pieces to emphasize the idea of intellectualism and Otherness in historically render images that have influenced me deeply (i.e. Venus Hottentot). The horns employed in the series were an incredibly important conceptual element used to evoke notions , the demonic, and the debauched, as horns usually symbolize in Western Judeo-Christian and Protestant context. I did not deny those to overturn them in the series, however, I wished to embrace those ideas with the subjects presented. I wanted the horns to show that there is something askew about this historically Western religiously pinned-on perspective, of the “horny” and/or otherwise. So, I explored how in religious history (i.e. Middle Ages) and connecting with the horror of slave trade, ignorance was a tool used to distinguish the haves from the have-nots and keep a sort of hierarchical balance. Religiously, to obtain knowledge in Feudal times (and emphasized by well-known and oratorically spread Original Sin parables) was equal to losing faith, losing God, goodness, and innocence. Thusly, the characters in the series donning the horns have lost their innocence because they have supposedly gained knowledge, obtained Truth, allowing them to be free from ignorance and domination. They are Open, in a way; they have gone through some struggle, some internal and external journey, to arrive at their truest selves. In essence, nothing can be taken away from them, and their horns are there to symbolize this feat to the viewer and warn off eyes seeking to objectify and dominate them. When they gained their horns, symbolically, they gained agency and became subjects of their own domain, not objects to be molded into the observers fantasy. There is palpable tension throughout this series, even in the choice of material: I am drawing directly on the wood, as if engraving it, with my ideas of these women who I hope to penetrate the viewers perception and question WHO these women are instead of WHAT these women are.

These ropes and rings are meant to represent helplessness. The ropes and rings take away each subjects mobility, thus disallowing them the luxury of control, esp. of themselves. Personally, I feel that the rings and ropes motifs of repression and immobility are manifestations of my own ideas taken away at times during the creative process. Particularly so, I feel, the rings used represent feelings of helplessness as an artist in dealing with expression without it feeling contrived.

When I asked Toyin about other things that she enjoys to do in her free time, she replied:

I read. Some people might think artists like to doodle at their spare time, as writers might like to write a few stray lines every now and then, but that is impossible for me. I’m not one of those people. My sketchbooks are filled with words, not images. I write what I am thinking, I don’t draw it. When I start to draw something, I instantly become my worst critic and everything that to be perfect. I can’t relax; I am too tense about it and it is ridiculous. I prefer reading fiction and relaxing in that way and being inspired.

She’s currently looking into applying to grad school to get her M.F.A.  Some of her artwork is for sale, so if you see an art piece that you like, you can drop her an e-mail here.  (She prefers her prospective art piece buyers to contact her personally.)  She also has an Etsy shop where she sells her artwork on apparel. Check out more of her artwork below.

Adesola, Viscountess, Pen & Ink on Matte Illustration Board 2008

Angela Yvonne Davis, Ink on Illustration Board 2008

Animorph, Pen & Ink on Mylar, 2007

Bushwoman, Pen, Acrylic, Wood Stain on Panel, 2008

Prince On Display, Pen,  Acrylic, Wood Stain on Panel, 2008

Sheba, Sheva, Shiva, Pen, Acrylic, Wood Stain on Panel 2008

Untitled, Pen Ink and Wood Stain on Wood Block, 2008

For more artwork, check out Toyin’s portfolio at www.toyino.com.

Tags: acrylic, Art, artist, Nigeria, Nigerian, painter, Protestant, Toyin Odutola, Western Judeo-Christian

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