02.05.1952–17.12.2012
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy (1952–2012) grew up in Nigeria among her father’s cocoa plantations, lived through the Biafran War as a teenager, moved to England in 1975 and took up painting professionally only at thirty-six. In 2002 she painted the official Golden Jubilee portrait of Elizabeth II, the second Nigerian artist after Ben Enwonwu to receive such a commission; her series “Migrants” and “African Slave Trade” are about something else entirely: dread, despair and hope.
Biography
On Commonwealth Day 2002, at Marlborough House in London, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon unveiled a full-length portrait of Elizabeth II for her Golden Jubilee. The commission from the Commonwealth Secretariat had been carried out by Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, and with this portrait she joined a very short list: before her, of all Nigerian artists, only Ben Enwonwu had been allowed to paint the Queen officially. The picture was hung beside her own portrait of the Secretary-General Emeka Anyaoku, which the Queen had unveiled in 1999.
By then she had been painting professionally for fourteen years.
She was born on 2 May 1952 in Nigeria, in Awka by one account, in Ondo State by another. There were seven children in the family. The family moved to Ikom, near the Cameroon border in Cross River State, where her father had large cocoa plantations. As a teenager she became a refugee in the Biafran War, then lived in the family home in Awka, and in 1975 she left for Britain. There she studied at East Ham College, in 1978 took an honours degree in graphic design at Hornsey College of Art, now part of Middlesex University, and only in 1988 took up painting professionally.
She painted figuratively: portraits, still lifes, landscapes, narrative pieces, and her portraits are usually light in mood. Among her commissions were portraits of the runner Kriss Akabusi and the Lord Mayor of Norwich, and the Arsenal footballer Martin Keown commissioned from her a view of the Highbury stadium; she was an Arsenal supporter herself. But she also has the series “Migrants” and “African Slave Trade”, of which a critic wrote as a mixture of despair, dread and aspiration. To my mind those two series say more about her than the royal commission. With several leading Suffolk artists she founded the Sudbourne Printmakers.
In 2003 she represented Britain at a European Council committee in Paris as an adviser on contemporary African art, and in December of that year she put together the “Celebrate” exhibition for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Abuja. Solo exhibitions were held in Ipswich, at the Mall Galleries and the Royal Commonwealth Society in London, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, at the Aldeburgh Festival, at the Didi Museum in Lagos and at UNESCO in Paris; since May 2006 her work has hung permanently at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. Her pictures are in the collections of Elizabeth II and of the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, and in collections from Antigua to Swaziland. The University of East Anglia gave her an honorary doctorate in 2003, in 2008 she addressed the Cambridge Union, and in 2009 she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. A children’s book about her, “Chinwe Roy – Artist”, is part of the British school curriculum.
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy died on 17 December 2012 at her home in Hacheston, near Framlingham, in Suffolk.
Profile notes