From his bedroom studio in Kasoa, Ohene Agyei is selling oil paintings for $2,000–$8,000 to collectors he has never met in cities he has never visited — and he has a waiting list.
The first thing Ohene Agyei says when you enter his bedroom is "don't touch the wet one." His studio — the term is generous for a 10-square-metre room in a family compound in Kasoa — is a testament to what obsession looks like with no resources and total commitment. Canvases lean everywhere. The smell of linseed oil is overwhelming.
Ohene is 19. He has been painting since he was 11, using house paint on cardboard before he could afford canvas. He sold his first real oil painting at 16 for GHS 150 — about $10 — to a teacher at his school in Winneba. His latest completed piece sold last month for $8,200 to a collector in New York who found him through Instagram.
"I don't know how people find me," he says, genuinely puzzled. "I just post and they message." His Instagram, @OheneCreates, has 62,000 followers. His work — large-scale figurative portraits of Ghanaian market women, fishermen, and children, rendered in deeply saturated colour — has a quality that is impossible to ignore even on a phone screen.
He has a waiting list of 18 people, all international, all paying in dollars. He is entirely self-taught. He has never taken a formal art lesson. He has never been on an aeroplane.
"I want to go to London and see the paintings in the museums," he says. "Not to study. Just to see. I want to know what old paint looks like up close." His gallery representation — he is now officially represented by a London gallery — should make that trip possible within the year.
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Ama Owusu
Ama specialises in lifestyle, fashion, and the creative economy. Her writing champions Ghanaian designers and entrepreneurs who are redefining African aesthetics.