Gallery Watatu simply the best in East Africa - Artist -- Eduardo Tingatinga Portfolio

Artist Profile

The self-taught E S Tingatinga drew fanciful images of people, flora and fauna in traditional settings where spirit figures, shetini, mizimu or tokoloshes, played hide and seek with good people and harassed the evil-minded ones. Tingatinga was fascinated by wildlife – lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, rhino, birds, snakes – and he painted them incessantly, mostly in matt-pastel shades and, occasionally, in bursts of vibrant surrealistic colours. Unable to afford oil he used industrial paints initially, and later, acrylic. He worked on cardboard, cloth, rubber and, only occasionally, on canvas. The most stunning of his works are on rubber.

In the Sixties Tingatinga drew many followers to his workshop in Msasani, a fishing bay outside the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. His “art school” was buoyed by growing demand, first, from tourists eager for an authentic African art to take home to America, Europe or Japan.

Tingatinga died tragically young, before reaching forty, having created perhaps not more than 200 works in total. His cousin Mpata and other acolytes including Chitawa, Amonde, Mruta, Msagula, Mzuguno, Tedo and Jaffary Aussi have carried on the tingatinga wave, if in more elaborate compositions and garish colours.

Today, to find an original E.S Tingatinga is a collector’s dream.