Landscape With Clouds II

Ekene Okoliachu

The extant atmosphere curves and billows above Ekene Okoliachu’s oil landscapes. The fecund colours the artist uses impress that this sky is a realm both of and not of this world. Infinity is incoming; the overwhelming experience is harnessed by the artist. 

Ekene references tonal impressionism a la Stuart Davies – an artist who has spent his career searching for “the perfect light” – as an important benchmark for his style. For marking the land Ekene uses oil paint in one way, contrasting with how he uses it to mark the sky. For the former the paint is laid slowly, deliberately, thickly down. For the latter, the artist blurs and sweeps the paint ethereally, conveying the sense of an ever-shifting, un-solid sky. 

In a Western European tradition the landscape is imbued with a sense of destiny – an open-ended destiny here, and a bright one.