Award-winning visual artist, Olalekan Adeyemi, recently made history by becoming the first artist to exhibit a visual illustration of how Bishop David Oyedepo’s ministry started and where it’s today.
He documents the arty part of Living Faith Church, popularly known as Winners Chapel, with 70 art pieces at the event to mark the 70 years birthday celebration of the cleric.
Known for his rich textured canvases, the exhibition did not follow his normal style of painting termed Oho, a Yoruba word which means shedding off the old for a new followed by cracking and peeling. “I didn’t apply the cracking and peeling method on the project, because the style wasn’t discovered as at the period I started the project. That is why they all appear in Realism,” he added.
The B.Tech graduate of Fine And Applied Arts, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria, said that documenting arty people had remained the major preoccupation of his art. His works mirror the daily human experiences, but in the case of Bishop Oyedepo@70 exhibition, he featured some of those works that largely tell stories of what the celebrant used to reveal while on the pulpit.
“The body of work reveals how he got his mandate at former International Hotel now Lekson, Ilesha in Osun State, how he started and how he went to Dumagi village in Kwara State for a 70 days vacation where he was presented a farewell gift from the grass church by the oldest man in the church who told him ‘’we heard that wherever church gets to, civilisation gets there, too.
Thank you for bringing civilisation to our village. Silver and gold we have none, but we give you this bush lamp (lantern), that the light you have brought to our village, let it shine around the world’,” said he.
“It equally reveals how Papa embarked on one and one evangelism and strategic evangelism he handled those days. I was able to touch base with one or two parts of it,” he added.
On how he got the vision, Adeyemi explained: “I joined Living Faith Church in 2014 but the vision came in 2015. God put it in my heart that year to document those oral histories Bishop Oyedepo used to share while in the pulpit. I began to target his 70th birthday from that year to 2024, where I documented 70 visual illustrations for his 70th birthday celebration. The works dwell on his stories and the striking moments when he thrilled worshipers.”
He said that he never accepted the vision at first, because he saw it as something huge and beyond his capacity: “I saw the project as more befitting to a Professor of many years practice in the contemporary art scene because it wasn’t quite long. I finished my Youth Service Corp when God laid it into my heart to carry out the vision. It was like No!No!!No!!! I can’t handle it, because it was too much for an emerging artist like me.
“It was not until I went to church on the following Sunday that one of the resident pastors at Living Faith Church Oroazi, Port Harcourt, Paul Olubo, who said at the end of his sermon: “God cannot give you money you can’t handle, God cannot give you vision you cannot handle, in as much as you have been given that vision, that means you can handle it.
“At this juncture, I was moved. I began to interrogate the message. Meanwhile, I had already intuited that I can’t handle it. But when I got home after service, I knelt down and prayed, asking God to reveal the truth about Him truly asking me to run the vision. And If so what would He have me do?
“I saw a book opened in front of me and I saw Papa lifting up from the page of the book and declaring that in certain years, several pages will be opened. At this point, I began to think of using my God-given artistic prowess to narrate the history of his ministry.
“I picked up my phone and googled the word history. What I saw further discouraged me. I had to put God to tasks: ‘If you want me to go ahead with the vision, prove it to me once more that you are truly the one behind it, so I wouldn’t have to push myself.’ God really responded with a proof that encouraged me to go ahead with the project,” he recalled.