User:Zmarks1/Obiora Udechukwu

Obiora Udechukwu, born in 1946, is a painter and poet from Onitsha, Nigeria.

Biography
Obiora Udechukwu was born June 4, 1946, in the largo Igbo trading center of Onitsha on the Niger River. Udechukwu comes from a middle class background. Udechukwu's parents came from Agulu. Angulu is where he first encountered uli murals at family compounds and shrines.

His work was shaped by his experiences during the 1967 to 1970 Biafra war. He received his early education in Anglophone; he had art training in both primary and secondary school. Udechukwu enrolled at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria in northern Nigeria in 1965, where pogroms perpetrated by the northern Hausa and Fulani against southern Nigerian immigrants interrupted his studies. Many deaths occurred in reaction to a federal-level coup that involved Igbo military officers, among other reasons. In 1966, Udechukwu fled to Igboland, where he and other Igbo received little support or sympathy from the Nigerian government; this made it difficult to live. He enrolled at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, spending time in rural Agulu, where he encountered Igbo village culture, including uli body art.

In the mid 1970s Udechukwu began what was to be more than a decade long process of refining the strategies of uli which had been defined by Uche Okeke at beginning of the previous decade. Okeke had initiated modern uli when in his search for a new esthetic he sought to translate the mural and body decoration art of the Igbo into a contemporary idiom .From Uche Okeke, who came to Nsukka from Zaria in 1970, he learned about Natural Synthesis, a theory of merging indigenous art traditions with western traditions to create a new, modern art form. In the late 1970s, Udechukwu began to incorporate nsibidi into his art. This design system originated east of the Igbo with the Ejagham, but it later spread to the southeast of Igboland. A system of motifs associated with male secret societies called Ekpe, which survive to this day, nsibidi can be used to send messages.