The Tingatinga
School of painting in Tanzania
Tingatinga short lived
as an artist (1968 - 72) but he triggered the emergence
of a growing number of Tanzanian youngsters who claimed
this style to be theirs and further developed it to become
what is now known as the Tingatinga School of painting,
a unique form of popular art genuine to Tanzania (...)
Today, no one dares to
paint like Tingatinga anymore and there are a few signs
left in present time paintings subsisting from E. S. Tingatinga's
iconography (...)
The Tingatinga way of
painting that has been entrusted to the younger generations
of painters, has been percolating during the past thirty
years, through the Tingatinga pyramid of know-how transfer,
from teacher to student, and so on.
In this process, the initial
input of E. S. Tingatinga at the very top of the pyramid
has been diluted, level after level, but it has also been
blending at each new stage by the timely injection of
the new artists' innovations or improvements of different
sorts.
Ultimately, what you see
nowadays as the Tingatinga style of painting truly represents
the time-matured chain-result of a popular school of art,
of a popular art movement articulated on the old-fashioned,
traditional way of master-to-apprentice transmission of
knowledge.
Tingatinga's stroke of
genius lay in the fact that he started to paint in an
environment where popular painting was non-existing and
fine arts painting was minimal. No matter how simplistic
his renderings of wildlife might have looked, they were
the spontaneous and sincere expression of an original
character.
His determination radiated
confidence in what he had started and became inspirational
for his entourage (...)
As of today, the Tingatinga
School of Painting has the form of a long and wide constellation
of artists, with a higher density in the Dar-es-Salaam
area but with patches of stars in Arusha and Zanzibar,
and with a few scattered and isolated stars around the
rest of the country. Within that constellation, all stars
shine, but some are more brilliant than others (...)
source: "Tingatinga - the popular
paintings from Tanzania" - Y. Goscinny
click here to watch an interview
with the president
of the Tingatinga Arts Society
