BEYOND THE COLOURS AND PATTERNS by Oladunni Olisa

I have visited several art galleries in Nigeria, and one thing often strikes me before I have had time to study any individual artwork: the colour.
At places such as Nike Art Gallery, the first impression is immediate. Paintings, textiles, sculptures and patterned surfaces seem to fill the space with energy. Reds sit beside blues, yellows beside greens, earthy browns beside unexpected bursts of orange and purple. The whole environment can feel vibrant and uplifting before you have even stopped to ask what any particular piece means.

I have felt something similar in other Nigerian art spaces too. Galleries and museums such as Thought Pyramid Art Centre and the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art remind me that preserving art is not simply about keeping beautiful objects in a room. It is about keeping stories, ideas, memories and creative knowledge within reach of another generation, it is history brought to life.

Perhaps that is one reason many of us were taken to museums and galleries while growing up. At the time, we may simply have been excited to leave the classroom. Looking back, I now understand those visits differently. They were invitations to look, notice, ask questions and begin to understand that art can say something about the people who created it.
Looking Beyond the Lines

One geometric pattern has stayed with me.
At first, I admired it because it was beautiful. The lines began unevenly, almost crooked, and gradually became straighter towards the end. I remember asking what the pattern meant.
The explanation changed the way I saw the piece.
I was told that the crooked beginning represented the difficult and uncertain stages of life, while the straighter lines towards the end suggested that things could become better with time.

I looked at it again, and suddenly I was no longer seeing only lines. I was seeing a journey.
The uneven part could represent moments when life does not go according to plan, when progress feels slow or when we cannot yet see where everything is leading. The straighter lines suggested growth, progress and hope.
That interpretation stayed with me because it reminded me that we often look at art too quickly. We see a line and call it a line. We see a shape and call it a shape. We admire the colour and move on.

But sometimes there is more waiting to be discovered.
A pattern can carry an idea. A shape can hold a memory. A line can suggest a direction. The beauty may be visible, but the meaning may need to be asked for, explained or imagined.
And perhaps life is like that too. When we are standing at the crooked part of the design, it is easy to believe that the whole pattern will remain that way. But the unfinished line is not the whole design. There is still more cloth ahead.When Patterns Carry Stories
This is also what makes traditional textile art so fascinating.

Take àdìrẹ, for example. What interests me is the idea that patterns can carry associations, memories and cultural meaning. A repeated shape may remind someone of family, motherhood, community, joy or status, while another pattern may draw attention to everyday life, work, nature or an experience remembered across generations.

Not every viewer will know the original meaning of every motif, and meanings can also change with time. But knowing that some patterns were created with thought and intention changes the way we look at them.
It reminds us that traditional art is not only decorative. It can also be communicative.
The Hands Behind the Beauty
There is another side of art that deserves attention: the process.

Before we see the finished work, someone has imagined it. Before the colours come together, someone has chosen them. Before a pattern repeats across cloth, someone has drawn, dyed, folded, stitched, resisted, painted or worked patiently until the design appeared.
We often admire the result without thinking about the concentration behind it.

Art reminds us that beautiful things can take time.That may be another lesson worth passing on. We live in a world where so much can be produced and consumed quickly, but creativity often asks us to slow down, observe, experiment, make mistakes, correct them and continue.The artist begins with something unfinished and gradually makes an idea visible.
There is something powerful about that.

Why Preservation Matters
The preservation of art is precious because it allows creative work to survive beyond the moment in which it was made.
A painting can outlive its painter. A textile can outlive the hands that dyed it. A sculpture can introduce someone born decades later to the imagination of another generation.
That is why galleries and museums matter.
They do more than store objects. They preserve evidence of thought, skill and cultural memory.
Not every generation leaves behind a written explanation of how it saw the world. Sometimes the record is in cloth. Sometimes it is in pottery. Sometimes it is carved into wood. Sometimes it appears in colour, shape and pattern.
When those works are preserved, another generation is given the chance to ask questions of them.Art and the Mind
I also think art matters because of the way it makes us feel.

Sometimes, before we understand a work intellectually, we have already responded to it emotionally. A bright painting may lift the mood. A familiar fabric may bring back a memory. A pattern may remind someone of a grandmother, a wedding, a hometown or something worn during childhood.
An unfamiliar piece can make us curious and that curiosity matters. Art can stimulate imagination, memory and conversation. It can make us stop long enough to notice something we might otherwise have ignored. A gallery can therefore become a meeting place between memory and imagination.

Teaching Children to Look Again
Perhaps when we take children to galleries, museums or cultural spaces, we should go beyond saying, “Isn’t that beautiful?”
We can ask, “What do you notice?” “How does this colour make you feel?” “What do you think those lines might mean?” “What story do you imagine when you look at this?”
Those questions help children understand that creativity is not only about producing something attractive. It is also about thinking, feeling, interpreting and communicating.
A child may look at the same crooked lines I saw and imagine a completely different story. That does not necessarily take anything away from the original interpretation. It shows that art can continue speaking in new ways.
The Legacy Behind the Beauty
The more art spaces I visit, the more I realise that the striking colours are often only the beginning.

Behind the colour may be history. Behind the pattern may be a message. Behind the textile may be generations of knowledge. Behind the sculpture may be a story waiting for someone to ask the right question.
That is why preserving art matters.
Not because everything from the past must remain unchanged, but because future generations deserve the opportunity to encounter it, question it and reinterpret it for themselves.
The splash of colour may be the first thing that attracts us. The pattern may make us stop. But the meaning is often what travels home with us.
And perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts of art.
It teaches us to look beyond what is immediately visible, to see possibility in an unfinished line, to imagine hope in a difficult beginning and to remember that the part we can see today may not yet be the whole design.

Oladunni Olisa
Author, Creative Writer & Educator
Creator of Then with Dunni on Instagram