Sam Ovraiti, b. 1961
Biography

Sam Ovraiti was born in 1961 in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised and educated in Warri, Edo State. He studied at the Federal Polytechnic, Auchi, graduating from its art department in 1983 and subsequently joining the faculty there as a lecturer, teaching within the school’s influential painting tradition.

By the early 1990s Ovraiti had built a reputation as one of Nigeria’s foremost watercolourists, working in the pastoral landscapes around Auchi — livestock, small idyllic houses, farms, farmers and market women rendered with close attention to light and colour. In 1993 he relocated to Lagos to pursue art full-time, shifting increasingly toward oils and mixed media while widening his subject matter to the city’s landscapes, seascapes and inhabitants.

Across this shift in medium and subject, Ovraiti’s practice has remained centred on colour itself — its psychological weight and expressive range — a preoccupation that has stayed constant from his early Auchi watercolours to his later Lagos-period paintings.

source: Hourglass Gallery