THE DUTCHMAN

The Dutchman, 1995
acrylic on canvas
48 x 72 inches
by MOYO OKEDIJI
Nigerian, born 1956

The Dutchman was painted after Okediji spent time in the United States and gained greater insight into the daily realities of African Americans. He encountered firsthand how artists confronted that reality in their work. It was inspired, in part, by African American poet Robert Hayden's poem about the Atlantic slave trade titled, Middle Passage:

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:
voyage thorough death
to life on these shores.

This painting perhaps best embodies the theme of this exhibition. It may also signify Okediji's own psychic reconnection to his long
lost ancestors strewn across the Atlantic and to those who survived in the New World.

Prominent tints of blue, competing with orange complements, have dual signification — the deep waters of the Atlantic and the pain
at the root of African American blues music. Here is the Middle Passage experienced through Yoruba eyes, now opened to the
deeper aspects of that passage.

This piece was in an exhibit called:
Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa


From

http://www.randafricanart.com/Moyo_Okediji.html


Moyo Okediji's "The Dutchman"
By Michael Smith

With the end of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s came a new era in African American art, especially with painting. There was a revival of the subject matter of ancestors and the hardships Africans endured during the European Colonial period and the days of slave trading. Moyo Okediji, a Nigerian writer and artist recounted the story of the shattered Igbá Ìwà, the calabash that held the sacred water of life, in his book The Shattered Gourd (Okediji 3-5). He compares the shattering of the sacred gourd to the shattering of Yoruba culture by slave trade. He also tells this tale with his painting The Dutchman, which is similar to many other 1990s African American works with its style, use of color, composition, and subject matter.

The Dutchman is a rather large painting at 48 x 72 inches. It uses a variety of colors but is dominated by blue and orange. It depicts Dutch slave trade, as evident by the slaves in shackles, the Dutch ship labeled in the upper right hand corner, and the slave trader in the upper left hand corner. The work does not clearly depict these things; they are composed of seemingly random blocks. Figures are distorted and choppy, appearing in several blocks of several different colors with several different textures. For example, the central figure at the bottom has light brown hands, darker brown arms and head leading into a blue midsection and finally, small black legs that are offset from the rest of the body. The entire work is infused with wavy lines, giving the impression of the ocean and water. The lines seem to start in the upper left hand corner and radiate outward to the rest of the painting. There are a total of eight slaves in the work, most of them packed into the top. Most of them are wearing shackles and the ones that are not appear to be jumping into the water.

The style of The Dutchman is very similar to that of other African American paintings and prints of the era. The work appears to be a collage-like assemblage of blocks of color that are vivid and eye catching. The complimentary colors blue and orange were placed next to each other to create brightness so that the painting catches the viewer’s attention. The colors are significant according to the Ackland label. The blue could symbolize African American blues music, or also the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a sad painting, and blue is one of the tools used to convey that sadness, as blue is often associated with sadness. A similar painting is Kerry James Marshall’s The Lost Boys. In this painting the artist used a combination of violet and yellow as well as red and green to call the viewer’s attention to the piece (Lewis 294). Lois Maliou Jones’s Jazz Combo is another example of typical works of the era, with bright, solid blocks of color, which again follow a complimentary color scheme (Amaki 199). The Dutchman follows the same stylistic approaches taken by other artists of the era with solid masses of bright colors combining to form images.

The collage-like assemblage of The Dutchman alludes to the artist’s story about the shattered gourd. The pieces that compose the painting are like pieces of the gourd that was shattered. The composition of the work is a triangle with the vertex at the bottom of the painting. The vertex at the bottom creates an upside down triangle. Rather than create a sense of stability as works do with upright triangular composition, this work does the opposite. It is as if the entire painting is teetering on the point at the bottom. The painting has been turned upside down and thrown into chaos, representing the slave traders coming into Africa and turning the people’s lives upside down.

Slavery as a subject matter for the work was also typical of African American Art of the 1990s. Emma Amos’s X Flag is an example of a work that contains images of slavery, with the Confederate Flag being the central focus of the work (Britton 86). The central focus of The Dutchman is the slaves and the slave trader that appears in the upper left hand corner of the work. He can be identified as a slave trader by his gun and skin color. He is the origin of the wavy and chaotic lines that represent the water of life spilled from the gourd. It is as if he knocked over the gourd and the water spilled all over the painting. According to the museum label, “The Dutchman was painted after Okediji had spent time in the United States, gaining greater insight into the daily reality of African Americans. (Ackland)” Perhaps the daily reality of the African Americans he saw was that they had forgotten their ancestors and lost their heritage and culture. This work reconnects the artist and African American viewers to their lost African ancestors that were traded as slaves and their lost African culture. The Dutchman also reflects Yoruba art. The figures have elongated bodies and enlarged heads, characteristics of traditional Yoruba works of art.

The Dutchman is exemplary of 1990’s African American art with its complimentary color scheme, collage-like composition, and allusion to slavery. It serves to remind viewers of the pain and suffering from the Atlantic slave trade, and the way it overturned the lives and culture of the African people, sending it into disarray like the smashing of the Igbá Ìwà. The artists of the era were trying to remind African Americans where they came from in an attempt to retain some of their African heritage.

Works Cited

Amaki, Amalia K., ed., A Century of African American Art. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers UP, 2004.

Britton, Crystal A., African American Art: The Long Struggle. New York: Smithmark, 1996.

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003.

Okediji, Moyo, The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth-Century American Art. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003.

From The Ackland Art Museum

at

http://www.unc.edu/courses/2005spring/engl/012/051/michasm/