TingaTinga legacy lives on in art

What you need to know:

THE ART FORM is used for inspiration and sometimes as a vehicle for social change

There is another dimension: Art is considered art if there is a market for the paintings. If you find an audience big and solvent enough to pay, any expression is art. If there is no such thing as a wide audience, it is only marginal art. And it seems to be difficult for Artists like Gregory Mchopa or Sarange, to access the better markets. Gregory says: ”We need a significant market. But for now, most of our paintings are bought by foreigners. Local people hardly know or recognise our work.” he says, standing between hundreds of images of different styles in a small and barely enlightened shop besides the Morogoro stores. Daniel Kamalamo, a street-artist, calls it business-Art. “To make a living, we have to draw what people like to buy,” he says. These are the well-known and similar looking scenes of the Maasai - either herding cattle, going to fetch water, preparing for a fight, hunting, or standing in a row. Or as another, unnamed street artist in Dodoma once said: “I know that ‘mzungus’ like the village scenes the most. And this is what we are providing you.“ He was offering pieces of art of Maasai-warriors or village-scenes, abstractly drawn with a pallet-knife, which looked nice, but not very different to those you find elsewhere.

According to the study, new artists were expressing their view on the society and were showing the excessively constraining form of administrative, political and judicial framing of people’s natural freedom. Furthermore, drawing Tingatinga is for the artists in TACS – a collective action, as the painters do continuously influence and copy each other, because they are painting together. One could say this is lack of fantasy. It is causing hundreds of pictures that look almost the same. But on the other hand, it makes Tingatinga art a collective work, while the style remains surprisingly pure. Although Tingatinga himself did not share his knowledge with more than five people, nowadays nobody really owns the right for the distinctive Tingatinga-pattern: his style and art is a collective property and even a vehicle for social change. And the style is also used to tell African fairytales as cartoons on social media like YouTube.

TingaTinga legacy lives on in art

What you need to know:

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