Ablade Glover

Ablade Glover's paintings hang in the Imperial Palace in Japan, at UNESCO's Paris headquarters and at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. He paints crowded markets, lorry parks and Ghanaian women with a palette knife, a tool a teacher in Newcastle suggested to him in the 1960s.

Early life and education

Emmanuel Ablade Glover was born in 1934 in La, Accra, and went to Presbyterian mission schools. He trained as a teacher at Kumasi in 1957-58, studied textile design at the Central School of Art and Design in London from 1959, and, on a scholarship from Kwame Nkrumah, art education at Newcastle upon Tyne. In the United States he earned a master's at Kent State and a PhD at Ohio State in 1974.

Teacher

For about twenty years he taught at the College of Art in Kumasi, now part of KNUST, becoming head of art education, associate professor and dean before he retired in 1994.

Artists Alliance

He founded the Artists Alliance Gallery in Accra, which grew from a gallery he started in the 1960s and was reopened in its current form by Kofi Annan in 2008. It shows his work alongside other Ghanaian artists and crafts. He has said he paints so many women because of their courage. His honours include the Order of the Volta, life fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in London and the 1998 Flagstar Award from the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana.