the tingatinga school of painting

THE TINGATINGA_SCHOOL

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