Interview with Nigerian Digital Artist Osinachi

Osinachi (born Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe, 24 October 1991) is a self-taught digital artist whose work explores personal experiences within a technological environment. Osinachi, who grew up in Aba, Nigeria, creates his work using Microsoft Word, where he utilizes the basic limited design palette of the word processing software to create narrative illustrations. 

Ahead of launching the AFRICA HERE curatorial project, which aims to promote African crypto artists to a wider audience, we caught up with Osinachi to learn more about his process, his experiences as a digital artist both before and after the explosion of NFTs, and the origins of his next big piece for MakersPlace. 

MP: Paint us a picture of your life pre-NFT. What kind of art were you creating? Were there any formative experiences that really shaped your artistic vision?

O: I think the key is that I read so much. I started out reading so much, then tried my hand at writing poetry, some bad poetry. Then short stories. I was introduced to what I would say is the visual interpretation of these stories through illustrations in the books, and they were lovely to look at. And as a child, I never had what’s called Art Education. That was never taught in my school. 

I would go out and buy books secondhand books from a particular shop in a particular market because people don’t read so much in Aba, the city where I grew up. So these books were easy to buy and cheap. Most of them were in very good condition. I started buying other kinds of books also. I remember buying one about art history — it talked about the Dutch Masters, the Renaissance period, and all of that was my introduction to art, as it were, until I got into university.

In university, I had the opportunity to go to art galleries, to go to art exhibitions. I did one course in Fine and Applied Arts, which was — I think it was Introduction to Art Appreciation. But before then, while I was doing so much reading, my dad introduced me to the computer for the first time. I started just playing around with the Internet. As a writer, as a budding writer then, I wanted to send out manuscripts to magazines, online magazines that were just coming up. I would go into Word to type my stories, but sometimes I’d get bored, and I’d play with Microsoft Word. 

I discovered drawing in Microsoft Word. Looking back now, I think I was trying to recreate what I was seeing in those books, where you have texts, and then there’s a visual illustration of what is going on, the text and then the visual illustration. That is what I tried to create. And that led me to start creating visual things. 

The first thing I remember creating was a logo of the Nigerian Television Authority, which is our national television here. Quite a simple logo. Then I went on to create other things. First I was playing with abstract figures. I’d just lay on the floor with my Dell laptop — that was the first laptop I ever owned — and tried to create in Microsoft Word. 

It wasn’t until 2015, the year that my National Youth Service ended, that I started thinking, “What am I going to do with my life?” Yes, I was one of the best graduates in my class, but I felt that I had been developing this skill of creating artwork in Microsoft Word and that I should use that to look for opportunities. And that was when it became serious for me, looking for art galleries that would maybe take a chance on my work and pay more attention to my art. Eventually, fortunately, I came back to the University of Nigeria, where I worked as an academic librarian in 2016.

On weekends I would sit in my bedroom and create on my laptop.

The year 2017 was the year I learned about art on the blockchain. I joined the first platform I ever joined, Rare Art, though they no longer exist. From there, other platforms would come out, like SuperRare and MakersPlace. So that has been my journey, in short. 

MP: What was your experience going into galleries with digital art?

O: I made it clear in those emails that the work I make is digital, and they were created with Microsoft Word. You can imagine what the response would be. Nobody wanted to take a chance on digital art. They had their concerns, which is valid. 

I’m grateful there was a marketplace — again, no longer around — called ARTOJ. They took a chance on my work, especially the abstract ones, and they tried to sell them as limited-edition prints. This wasn’t a gallery; it was an art marketplace. That was the only opportunity that I got that was close to working with a gallery. It wasn’t until NFTs became mainstream that galleries started paying attention to digital art. 

MP: Looking at your work and knowing your background as a writer, I can’t help but think that a lot of your work stands in for writing a short story. How do you think about story and what you’re trying to accomplish? 

O: I like to think that I’m a great artist. But of course, sometimes I’m lazy. I mean that should be the same thing with so many other artists, right? Procrastination or whatever. So when I was doing so much writing, sometimes it would take too long that maybe I would lose interest. Paragraph after paragraph, and then you have to come back to check for grammar. It was a bit tedious. Yes, I used to enjoy it. But it was a bit tedious. 

I found out that creating art was a bit more urgent to pass the message across for me. I just had to create these visual elements and bring them together in one piece. And it’s not even a short story. It is a whole novel. There are so much so many interpretations. There’s so much to see. And they’re a part of me in these stories. As an African child, I couldn’t connect to stories with tea parties and things like that. Creating visual pieces, I can embody my own story. I feel that that is what visual art has done for me. 

MP: Which of your pieces do you feel the strongest emotional connection to and why? Which piece feels the most personal?

O: I think I share some sort of connection to every piece I create because — I don’t know how else to say, but every piece I create comes from my heart, right? And I feel that, coming from my heart, there’s also a piece of probably a memory that is in there in the work, some sort of experience that I’ve had while growing up as a child, that is in there in the work. So there’s a connection that every artist has as with their work, and that is very much present in my own. I won’t say there’s a particular one that is a favorite.

MP: Have you seen the NFT market (and web3 more broadly) influencing the African art scene?

O: Very few African artists get the attention they deserve in the NFT space. This doesn’t mean that their work is not good. I was the first African artist in the space. And I feel that that has given me a sort of leverage as an OG, which is good. But there’s a lot of noise in this space. So much so that African artists are not being seen. 

But African artists have been creating wonderful pieces. They’ve been creating works that embody the African story. I’m not just talking about artists who are working traditionally. I’m also talking about artists who are working digitally.

Just like myself, most of them were creating digital art before they found out about NFTs. The only way they could survive was on corporate commissions, and they would be paid a paltry sum to at least keep them breathing. 

But they’ve also been creating their own stuff, whether it’s on their computer, whether it’s on the iPad, whether it is on the canvas. Now, entering the NFT space, there’s so much noise, and it’s frustrating. 

They hear that the NFT space is a place where artists like themselves can fly. Especially for the artists that galleries have rejected, artists whose work isn’t taken seriously because it’s digital. Then they enter the space, and they find it difficult to get traction because there’s a lot going on. 

It’s all pfp and avatar projects and money, money, money. Let’s talk about art and what it represents for the person who created it and for the person seeing it. If we change the conversation to talk about the art, we’ll start to make connections in terms of influence and culture. 

African artists need a platform to tell their stories, but this doesn’t mean they need their own marketplace. I don’t think there should be anything like an NFT space solely for African artists because we are trying to create something global and decentralized. We want to break down walls. 

But that doesn’t mean you are going to deny your roots in your work. Maybe your roots are going to show in your work, and what it means is carrying everybody along at the same time, and that is difficult to do at this time because of the noise that is going on. There need to be deliberate actions in terms of putting African artists out there spotlight

MP: Can you describe the Lagos art scene for those who aren’t familiar?

O: Lagos is a vibrant city. I lived in Ngu when I was an academic librarian for four years. When things started to move in the NFT space, I moved to Lagos. I could work from Ngu and still be as relevant, but Lagos is the cultural capital of West Africa. Nollywood was born here. Artists like Ben Enwonwu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby have roots in Lagos. 

The art scene here is full of young people, mostly, and it’s full of energy. In all of that chaos, that’s where the energy comes from. Every week, there are new exhibitions to see every week. It’s a vibrant, noisy place. 

MP: What’s your advice on pricing for artists putting out their first NFT? Any potential pitfalls to avoid?

O: I know that we all want to make it, but then there’s a need for artists to stay true to their art. 

Right. I know that can be difficult. I imagine a scenario where I didn’t know about the NFT space until 2022. What I would naturally do is go look for strategies on how to succeed in the NFT space.

I’ve seen people who set out to imitate other people’s work because they’re trying to sell, but that is not staying true to your art, not if you’re trying to imitate someone else. A unique voice in the space is the only thing that would really set you apart from the crowd. And that is what we need 

I see art as a sort of empty room. If you come into an empty room, and you tell a designer to help you decorate the room and you come into the room later, and there’s a bed frame here, a bed frame there, and a bed frame there. It’s all bed frames. That wouldn’t be nice. Right? 

Instead, you can come into the room and see different furnishings, the different voices that come into the space and make the space as beautiful as it is. 

That is why we still talk about people like Picasso and Basquiat, because of their unique voices.

I know it takes years to actually develop it, but just keep doing your thing and stay true to your art. You’re certainly going to find your voice. Don’t expect some sort of overnight success in the space. It takes time to build your thing out and create yourself as the artist you want to be. People will appreciate you for your authenticity.

MP: How do you block out the noise? How do you know you’re developing your own voice? 

O: There’s always influence, right? I mean, if a good artist also consumes art, right? That’s influence, but it is small acts of subconscious influence, not conscious. 

For example, I go to an exhibition of Basquiat’s and I look at his works. And I come back and I say I want to create like Basquiat. That’s different from maybe two years from now I create something or someone looks at a piece and says hey, I see a sort of a little bit of Basquiat here. 

So the influence is always there, but it’s just when you are focused on the noise that it becomes a problem. You lose touch with what you’re supposed to contribute. 

What some people would say the universe has prepared you to actually give to the world, right? It’s why you’re here. You sort of lose touch with that and the message you’re passing across might not really come through the way you want it to come through. So you sort of block out all of that noise and focus. 

I don’t like to tweet. I wouldn’t have been active on Twitter if it wasn’t for NFTs because that’s where you connect with people, but there’s a lot of noise. I stay away from these places for a while just to focus on what I want to create. 

You go on Twitter, and you might see a notification about someone selling a piece for $100,000. Right, and you haven’t sold anything in months. So it gets to you as an individual. You’re a human being, and it gets to you as if my work not no longer good enough. What is going on? Are people not seeing my work? So that pressure might get to you, and it’s not actually good for the creative process.

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