6 minute read
Niqo Sama
Creative Energy
By Frank Etheridge
Niqo Sama has always felt the urge to create.
An accomplished, self-taught painter after just five years as a visual artist, he first felt the powerful pull of self-expression while at Northside High School, when he followed his first muse – music – and began making beats. After graduating and working toward a degree in Computer Science at Savannah State (the oldest public HBCU in Georgia), he again noticed that unmistakable, intangible need to create which every true artist feels – to think outside the box, to draw outside the lines.
“It was crazy,” he recalls of his college days, ”When they had us building calculators and designing software programs, I felt this need to just create something new.”
It wasn’t until 2019, years after the self-professed “military brat” returned home to Columbus, that he first picked up a paint brush. He was inspired to explore the medium after hanging out with his friend Jillie (@jilliecreates) who created commissioned portraits for several well-known hip-hop artists (including Latto and the late, great Young Dolph), and whose work is featured in the Atlanta Trap Museum.
“I’m always open to trying new things,” he says, “So one day after hanging out with Jillie I decided, ‘I want to see what I can do with that. After my first couple of paintings, it was a wrap from there. That’s when I picked up art.”
Speaking on a wet Saturday afternoon in September in his garage studio in North Columbus, Niqo (his artist name taken from his first name, Dominique) explains that he currently works in IT for eBay, after years of doing it for Aflac. “It keeps me busy,” he says of his fulltime job, noting homeowner expenses such as a new HVAC, not to mention the cost of raising his energetic 3-year-old son, Luca. He comes out to the garage to paint – typically acrylics on canvas, though he’s begun experimenting with oils and mixed-media – when he can find the time.
“I’m off on Fridays, and everybody else is gone at work and school, so that’s my go time,” he says, noting he’s completed roughly 120 works. “Or after everybody is asleep. That’s been a big adjustment for me lately –fatherhood. Getting my son down to sleep then coming out here, that’s usually my goal.”
Given all life’s pressures and demands on his time, why paint?
“I have to have an outlet to express myself,” Niqo explains. “I used to make beats. Now I paint. I like the process, seeing it evolve. I like the geometry and patterns in it. That’s when the nerd side of me comes out big.”
He also enjoys the business side of being an artist – and he should, given that in just the five years he has been painting, Niqo has graduated from small group pop-up shows in Columbus to the walls of Atlanta business executives’ offices and several trips south to
Miami, where this last December he showed his work during Pop Basel, one of the premier art gatherings in the Western Hemisphere.
“The business side is cool,” he says. “It’s never a hassle and allows me to interact with people I never would have [had] a conversation with outside of art. That’s a fun result of all this, too.”
One of his notable recent experiences was during a gallery showing at Miami Art Week in December. “It was crazy,” he recalls. “Thousands of people came through in a day. Meeting all these people from all over the world, seeing all that art, making connections, it really opened my eyes and I knew, ‘This is where I want to be.’”
Niqo doesn’t mean he wants to leave Columbus. It’s home for him and his family. In fact, his biggest collector is his barber, who displays his paintings in his home and on the walls of his shop on Manchester
Expressway, VNU. However, he says, he feels his message is bigger than Columbus. Bigger, even, than Atlanta.
“My biggest goal is getting my message out to a bigger audience,” he says while seated in his garage. Next to him is a large-scale painting depicting “a human-like seedling growing out of the ground,” under which the words “Nothing Was a Mistake” are printed. It is listed for sale for $7,000.
What’s his message?
“My message is that there’s always a message. I look at everything in a spiritual sense, even if it’s something that may seem simple or mundane or you think it means nothing to you. I like to put aspects of sacred geometry and ancient symbols into my paintings that are relevant to me. Concepts of life and death, birth
and rebirth, the tools to kill or to grow, depending on what your intentions are. People are gonna catch on, depending on how deep they want to go with it, but they’re always going to be there.”
Niqo Sama has studied color theory and techniques of Renaissance masters, who also encoded sacred geometry into their paintings. He loves when the art in his garage catches the eyes of neighborhood kids, smiling as he tells the story of a girl who looked at the painting which declares “Nothing Was a Mistake” and who told him, ‘That is the truth.’
“I’d like to one day put a book together that you could just flip through and check out my paintings and phrases all condensed together. It’d be my little book of wisdom,” he explains. “I feel like I do have a purpose in my painting, a desire to put something out into the world that’s going to help it.”
Follow Niqo Sama art on Instagram @niqosama.
