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JAFFARY Rashid Aussi, 1960

Jaffary Aussi is the son of Rashid Aussi, an E.S. Tingatinga's relative who was a governement employee and a leading member of the Makua comunity in Msasani.

Born in Dar-es-Salaam, the young Jaffary saw the first tingatinga painters working and displaying their works at Morogoro Stores nearby his home. In 1974, upon completing his Primary Education, he joined this group as a trainee. Jaffary also joined "Nyumba ya Sanaa" (The House of Art), a cultural centre in Dar dedicated to arts and crafts.

He later became a member of the Tingatinga partnership and the newly created TACS, but in 1994 left to Arusha and started his own studio and gallery.

As a leading painter of the school, Jaffary has received growing attention in art circles worldwide. His first one-man exhibition was held in july 1987, at a gallery in Aoyama, Tokyo. The event was celebrated at the time by the leading Tanzanian newspaper, "Daily News", with a long article, "Keeping the Tingatinga Spirit alive",examining how the Tingatinga spirit has been sustained. This article helped win worlwide recognition for Jaffary Aussi and other artists of the Tingatinga school for the first time since the death of E.S. Tingatinga.

From early on, the tingatinga school artists used two or three colours for background gradation, Jaffary used even more colours, and by harmonizing them, added a feel for time and space, and even texture to Tingatinga style painting, which until then lacked a sense of perspective.

The deformation technique of founder E.S. Tingatinga, was refined into design. Jaffary transformed the birds and beasts of Africa into beautiful, rhythmical forms.

After the show in Tokyo in 1987, Jaffary held a show in Finland in 1989 and became increasingly active in international art circles. By that time, his technique of gradation had changed greatly and, and the new monotone backgrounds were very successful. This new tendency was visible in the "Tingatinga Arts exhibition" in Tokyo on May 1991.
In the latter half of 1991, Jaffary returned to his emphasis on gradation, as exhibited in a series of recent works. Jaffary Aussi may have decided that his new method of gradation was best for reverently portraying the wild animals. In this balance of colour and and forms, we can see the consistent bloodlines of the Makua people.

In 1992 Jaffary Aussi undertook a project to create mural paintings in Mito and Tokyo.He held several successful exhibitions in Tokyo and also in Finland, Denmark and Switzerland.

source: "Tinga Tinga, the popular paintings fom Tanzania", Y. Goscinny and "Tingatinga", F. Yamamoto

image courtesy of Capt. Felix Lorenz