AFRICANEWS
AngolaIt is a new AngolaPatrick Chapita (599 words)
Angola artists say the time has come for their nation to regain the position it had decades ago. They are now sending out this message through their arts and paintings. With peace currently prevailing in Angola, local artist and painters are also changing their attitude. Their art and paintings no longer portrays obscene scenes of war but new developments that are currently taking place-all in the effort of nation building. During the blood-letting 20-year-old civil war, artists in Angola were always depicting brutal scenes of war in their arts. Particularly, every artist tried by all means to show the extreme devastation, the war had caused to their country. Their work, would portray, maybe a single building in a city which is no more than a concrete skeleton, ravaged by shelling and pocket-marked with bullet holes. Sometimes, the artists' work would be showing a helicopter in action, bombing or even being shot from the air by a rocket. Some pictures would be showing children wailing, their parents being hacked to death and all other nasty things in the civil war. With hostilities ending in Angola, artists in the capital Luanda have also changed their way of seeing things. They no longer depict those ugly scenes of war in their work, but what is going around them in these times of peace. Lucius Quinquino, a 38-year-old self-taught artist in Luanda says artists are people who should move with the times. "If there are changes in the society, that is what we are supposed to see - we should change our way of seeing thing," Quinqino explains. "We no longer have civil war and we are enjoying peace, that also mean that even art and paintings should also do the same". He add: "Continuing to display scenes of war is like opening the old wound-Angolans are tired war". Artists say it was time, their are should take people back in time that is in the 60's when Angola was self-sufficient in basic food. "Showing Angolas' fertile farming lands as they are once again planted our new roads with plenty cars on them to help to tell that the war is over and there is peace," said Quinqino. Their art is now fetching more United States dollars than before, artists claim. More foreign buyers are interested with Angolan life. Artist are now portraying a reflection of what is going around them. They are showing people going back to their rural homes in jovial mood, queues of people being distributed with seed packs for farming and oil factories with belching smoke to show that they were back in action. "As there is nothing to prevent our movement as artists, we can travel to other areas see other people, talk to them and also be in contact with the nature," said Quinqino. He adds: "My work are now portraying happy pictures, that is people at work in the fields, woman at an Aids seminar, everything that show a happy mood". Aids campaigning activities, environmentalists and other officials from the ministries of health and defence are equally happy with the current works being portrayed by the artists. "Angolan people have a new war _ that is the battle against Aids," says Maria Olivia Fortunato Torre, the secretary general of Angolan Association of the fight against Aids. "I am happy that our artists have also taken it to educate the people about the dangers of HID/AIDS that is now threatening the country. Though there is sometimes a lot of fun in some of the art, however the message these pictures send out is very serious and educative," She explained.
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