TAFA

Born                 Ghana

Education        College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science Technology in Kumasi, Ghana

Musical rhythms, heavy passionate strokes, lush energy-laden hues and spirituality all blend together in Tafa´s lyrical paintings creating his personal voice. Through this voice his figures pray, exult, dance, live, drum, wail and march- sometimes charged, sometimes sublime, sometimes mystifying, sometimes revealed. "My painting is my drumsong, my dance of the soul," Tafa explains. "Like singing, it could be a song of love and pain, faith and strength, nostalgia and reconnection, but these songs I must sing." I am like the `Okyereme´, the divine drummer," says Tafa, "trying to serve as a medium of essence...to materialize the transient, the spiritual, to immortalize the soul of drumbeats, the enigma of the drum, to concretize song as a visual sensation."

Tafa gained international recognition as a painter when his work "Turning Swords into Swatches," won first prize in the Swiss Painting Competition in 1989 and was exhibited throughout Switzerland.

Numerous galleries, educational and cultural institution and individuals in the U.S., Europe and Africa have exhibited Tafa´s oil and acrylic paintings. His works are in a number of permanent public and private collections including the Swiss National Collection; Ghana´s National Museum; Washington, D.C.´s Superior Court, and former Mayor David Dinkins, New York City.