500 Followers! — My Writing Journey And A Bit Of My Creative & Life History.
It’s Been A Journey Of Several Creative Juices!
It’s been quite a journey to reach this stage on Medium; a platform I joined about four years ago but only started utilizing fully roughly ten to eleven months ago. Below is a poetic summary of my writing experiences, adventures, and journey to get to this point!
Date of Composition: 8th August 2023 | 20:11 pm PST.
I feel like Writing!
I feel like Reminding…
I feel like Rewinding!
I feel like… Smiling!
I’ve felt like dying… Dude
I’ve felt like smashing… Everything
I’ve felt like fighting… Reality
If I don’t say so, I’d be lying… Clue
I was born in Lagos, Nigeria…
I lived there till I was 17 years of age…
In 2007, I traveled to Kharkiv, Ukraine…
I had a great experience there meeting, traveling, studying, and interfacing with various people.
Several years later, I returned to my home country on July, 21st, 2015, the next morning after I miraculously survived a racist attack and ambush by a Skinhead group (10+, dressed in all black, & including both males and females) on my last night in the Country
After studying the coveted course of Medicine, with a Cardiology Master’s degree added to my take-home certificates…
In Nigeria, I worked as a Doctor for several years with intermissions,
Before moving to Canada last year.
In between, I became a Certified Health Coach, and a graphic designer, and acquired tons and tons of certificates (my LinkedIn profile is overwhelming),
But I have been pushing my passions, my dreams, and my heartfelt desires on the side, gradually but consistently…
Deep within, and since maybe the age of 6, I always felt I was destined to be a writer.
Even though I could not fathom how, I always knew I was going to write a book in the future… (I’ve published 5 in just over Two Years)
But by 2016, I could only write scattered words in my favorite notebook and thoughts I’m yet to complete to this day
All my attempts at writing a book encapsulated three short incomplete chapters and less than thirty full pages
As for poetry, I admired poetry but I never felt the spark until three years ago
Now the tap runs freely in my skull every day and I have written over five hundred poems!
For over four years, the most poetry I had written was just six lines…
Of a poem I titled, ‘RED’ and would later expand to a page and publish in my first book, The Curtain Raiser.
On the creative productive side, my life has been in clearly defined & obvious stages,
I have been learning how to dance since I was a teenager, but that I learned,
I studied music & instruments in high school but did only one or two professional exams; so I taught myself all the songs I can play currently…
Art came as a burst on its own in the past ten years when I discovered I could express my emotions through a digital stylus pen…
Almost daily, after work, I created my best pieces of art during a period when I suffered a mental illness.
But the artistic creations flowed for only three years and by the fifth year, another creative spark had taken over… (writing & poetry). In high school, I joined lots of clubs, including the talent club — dancing and entertainment were my contributions; I recall rapping R-Kelly’s song, Ignition from beginning to end on stage by heart. I didn’t miss a word but my head was facing my feet the entire time; it was my first time on stage in front of a real crowd. To date, I have the lyrics of lots of rap songs memorized (more particularly Eminem & 50 Cent). Still, just as interestingly, as you will read in my book, Respectful Ideation, I have lots of other things memorized as well, e.g. that the square root of 3 to 7 decimal places is 1.7320508. I am much more comfortable on stage now, as you will find in my book AFROLEON, I performed and danced at several theaters during my University days in Ukraine.
But luckily I was able to create about eight full art collections (view gallery section) — The Overtones, The Brownies, The Exprojections, Artbeat, The Scrubs, Unconventional Shades, Freedom, & one of my favorites, The Mavericks. I just remembered that I created a new collection titled, Airport, during a period when I received some creative spark around the end of last year. So, make that 9 collections. I will update it on my website immediately. I will write more about my artworks in upcoming posts; writing this article brings back so many memories and positive emotions. My artworks are like my babies, each carrying heavy positive emotional valency and associated intuitive fondness; I love the process of creating something new and each new artwork was like giving birth to a new child; art really is beautiful. Perhaps more so because with my type of art, abstractionistic expressionism, my work starts from a blank canvas and I always have to attempt to create something new, dipping my stylus pen in the pool of God’s Wisdom until I can extract some intuition and generate a new ‘artifact’.
Abstract art most times gives off a different vibe to every one and it isn’t uncommon for people to give different interpretations of the same work. However, with SILHOUETTES, it is easy to infer the connotations I was trying to establish with my depictions. First off, The Brownies Collection is unique in that all works represent a temporary love triangle between me, the black color, and a shade between cream & brown. But with SILHOUETTES (#5 in the series), just as the name describes, it indicates shadows of thirteen unique day-to-day eye-catching activities, some with more obvious representations than others with the use of iconic shots of history like dancer, MJ (Michael Jackson) and footballer, Paul Pogba with the ‘Dab celebration. SILHOUETTES is very special to me because it involved a lot of thinking, imagination, openness, and uninhibited play with creativity. All my artworks are, but with The Brownies Collection, it was an especially daunting adventure that I fully embraced. As you will read in my write-up, at certain points I had to leave my artworks half-completed, thinking about what elements or features to add next to increase the fascination, and also, by the end of this Collection in particular, I felt like I had stretched my creativity to the max. After THE BROWNIES and THE MAVERICKS, I didn’t create any more works for a while, creating just three to five new artworks for my second most recent collection, FREEDOM, before my latest, AIRPORT, late last year (2022).
What a few people don't know about my paintings is that even though they are digitally created, I still use a Stylus Pen, which is akin to a ‘digital paintbrush’ — a paintbrush it still is; in that sense, all my works are still ‘hand-made’.
While art projects slowed down and took a pause, the website I created in November 2016 with my first salary kept running,
I learned how to use WordPress and later E-commerce, and I created my logo in 2016 with a gimp2 software after watching some YouTube videos.
I did not know I was going to become proficient in graphic design & Adobe Creative Suite moving forward
Nonetheless, every aspect of my website was designed and but for a few months, managed by me since 2016 till what it is today
And now it serves as both a personal brand for my Books, Art, Photography, Modeling, and Dance & Vlogging videos!
And as a professional brand including My Wellness Company (Befibrillator Wellness), as well as a Global E-commerce site
I suffered for almost a full year in 2020 with the same mental illness, incapable of working professionally…
It was during this period I started writing scraps and pieces of what turned out to be my first full-fledged book
After the collection of 25 Poems I self-published as my first Chapbook in the public domain in February of 2021,
I was able to self-publish my Ukrainian Memoir in four formats the following year
Including an Audiobook; read more in this poem/prose — Addiction and STEAM. I AM.
And a month after AFROLEON, I published my second Chapbook called Respectful Ideation,
Which was also the name of one of my first-ever digital paintings and a concept I coined in May 2016
Respectful Ideation is one of my best works and the only book of mine in black and white
The above is a page and part of the third stanza of a poem from the epic book of poems, EvolutionR. It is an extremely mind-blowing poem and one of its kind in the entire book. It consists of 4 rhythmical quatrains and 16 unanswerable questions, with each new question more outrageous than the prior one! This magnificient poem is titled — HELP ME SOLVE THIS PUZZLE IN BETWEEN THE MIDDLE OF MY MIDBRAIN and lies at the exact center of the book.
I am a big fan of depictive learning and colorful (tasteful) storytelling
So, all of my books have pictures to amplify the reading experience
But I made Respectful Ideation black and white because it is indeed a unique book
The poems came out of me in a period when my thinking went through a phase of transformation
A phase that lasted barely 7 days (I also talk about the unique experience in the above poem — Addiction and STEAM. I AM)
7 days that produced 23 unique poems and no, I didn’t forget about the word mind-blowing (because that’s what you’ll think after reading them); for me, I think unique is the perfect word. Here’s an example of two of my favorite works from Respectful Ideation — DREAMING & WORD World (READ DREAMING FIRST, please; the poem is absolutely fantastic! After the curator at the New West Public Library glanced at the poem, she couldn’t hide her excitement at accepting my books.!!
As you will be able to tell if you have followed me for a while or read my books,
I am extremely good at describing my experiences
And since I was blessed with the gift of poetry,
I am able to combine my thoughts, experiences, and values in an entertaining way
This is what I did with EvolutionR; the first book I released since coming to Canada…
Enough talking about it, right? Well, just go ahead and get a copy!
On the cover you will see the words -
The best book of poetry that man has never made
I had to write it that way because,
Growing on Medium has been an amazing experience; I have enjoyed interfacing with you all! I am a big fan of taking your time to express your thoughts, observations, analysis, or even feelings through your manuscripts, your poetry, or any piece of writing so I am privileged to be a part of this community. Finally, I want to mention a couple of people whose works stand out and who have made a mark on my soul with their writing and/or with their heartfelt wishes, comments, and genuine engagement. Lest I forget, I am grateful to all the managers and editors of the various publications because their hard work gives us an opportunity to grow and connect with more like-minded people on the Medium platform.
