‘This little light of mine’: Coffee artist illuminates children lost to conflict

Growing up in Lagos, Ekene recalls being a painter from childhood, his education was curated around improving what he knew from a young stage that he wanted to do all his life, painting. His journey first started with painting with acrylics and watercolours.

“I needed to stand out because when I looked around, I saw a lot of gifted artists doing hyper realism work in Nigeria, it was almost like we were all doing the same thing. There was a need for my art to be able to stand on itself and speak my name. As time went on, I experimented with different medium- water colours, shoe polish. My first exhibition launched a café in an airport and it gave me a relationship with coffee,” he says.

After this experience and subsequent interactions with the franchise as part of the branding team, Ekene would fall in love with the coffee spirit. He would later on go back to his studio and make a gel out of coffee which he used to make a painting; an experience he lauds as fantastic.

“I fell in love with coffee as a drink but to be able to create something out of a beverage I loved so much which even retained the aroma of coffee was mind blowing for me. I felt it was the unique style that I had been looking for and therefore decided to keep it.”

Later on, he went online to look for kindred spirits and recalls stumbling into a Russian, some Americans and Europeans and a couple of Brazilians.

“I get my inspiration from things happening around me. I wanted to paint more of Africa. I wanted to paint stories that lie ignored, stories that bear history and advocate for specific rights,” he says.

In terms of solubility, coffee provides a versatile medium for Ekene to paint his subjects. His use of watercolours combined with acrylics and coffee results in works with strong, rich tones of melanin that stands out from shades of ebony across different mediums.

In his paintings, he primarily uses instant coffee, which is more soluble and has a smoother texture. Sometimes, he uses coffee alone, but at other times he employs coffee bean rolls to create patterned mosaics and textures in his murals.

Ground coffee, however, does not feature in his palette because it leaves particles behind. For him, coffee is a unique medium because it carries a vibrancy not found in most colours; he describes it as a dye that can stay on paper or canvas for a very long time.

“Coffee has been different from the moment I first discovered it as a medium. From my first piece, it attracted different kinds of reactions, especially from people who understood the coffee culture, which isn’t so strong in Nigeria as it is in Kenya or America. It makes me stand out because when you think about coffee and think about art, you think about me, which is amazing,” he says.

For an artist who lives with a disability, Ekene remains nonplussed about how it affects his creativity.

“It changes nothing with regard to my creativity. What it does is simply limit my movement from one location to another. I don’t go out or move around a lot. I prefer to stay and move within my energy and use it to create art. That has been the only major challenge I have had.”

This Little Light of Mine is a continuation of the theme whose body of works was first showcased in Lagos, Nigeria last year. It was inspired by Ekene’s personal experience as a disabled person.

“I have been drawing and sketching ever since I was 3. Back in the 80s, every parent wanted their children to be a doctor lawyer or a surgeon. If you were not doing any of these things, you would die poor. I had my lights, and my dream was always to be an artist. My parents had to understand this, and they were able to guide me to grow up to live my dream, exposing my light to the entire world.

“The moment I started getting my interviews on CNN, BBC and the rest of them, that was my light, which God had given to me, being exposed. I have been able to nurture it so that I could be like the city on the hill, as the Bible says.”

In the exhibition, Ekene’s work is largely inspired by the works of Rembrandt and Agnes Cecil, the latter who is in her late 30’s being a core inspiration, especially with her signature style of drips, splashes and splotches. Ekene’s work fuses the signature styles of these two greats to come up with a language in coffee that speaks of his identity.

The exhibition reflects on the many children that had the opportunity to show their lights as Ekene has. It uses the kids who have been abducted and killed during the various civil and religious strife as the leitmotif.

“I care more about the children who are the future of the nation, my paintings in this exhibition give them the opportunity to show their light. We don’t give these children the opportunity to show us their lights because we are kidnapping and molesting them and thus snuffing out whatever wisps of potential that was unfurling in them.”

The children in his coffee infused murals carry their own lights. They are silent pleas to humanity to cease and desist from stomping on their dreams and potentials. Their innocence is at a crossroads in wars win which they pay the heaviest prices, their crime? Being children.

The exhibition is a call for the collective responsibility of world to end the madness amongst humanity in especially in Nigeria that allows children to be caught in the crossfires of political atrocities amongst adults.

His muses come from ideas ringing in his head. His child and nieces become the trial and error models that lead to the complete body of works now shown.

Growing up amongst boys who could all draw, Ekene describes his journey into art as a personal calling whose sound was louder than the rest. His path through science school was for the sake of his parents to whom he handed over his certificates upon graduation so that he could pursue art.

“If I had ended up in being a surgeon, I might have been drawing on patients before cutting them up, so I decided to just stay on my lane,” he says with a chuckle.

His exhibition runs until December 20, 2025.