“When I represent Africa, I’m representing the world,” says Rochester-based artist Jahbulani Ori.
Ori’s detailed canvases are inspired by Africa and the cosmos. According to the biography on his Art by Jahbu website, his art is “inspired by the culture and spirituality of the many unique tribes native to Africa.”
His work also often incorporates different celestial bodies like planets, black holes, and the moon.
Ori describes himself as a Rastafarian artist. For him, in part, that means he focuses on the many connections in the world around him. “Observation is everything,” he says.
His digitally painted canvases, often created using around 700 discrete layers in Photoshop, are intricate and seem to reveal new details every time they are examined. “I want people to look at my work more than once,” explains Ori.
When Ori creates in his studio, he works rapidly, usually standing, using a stylus he’s wrapped in many layers of fabric, so it fits his right hand comfortably. His left hand works two different remotes with buttons and dials shifting the color and line or spray-like style his stylus creates on a large touch-sensitive tablet screen. He’s surrounded by electronic gaming paraphernalia like a wall full of Mass Effect figurines and posters and wall hangings for action roll-playing games like Kingdom Hearts.
Ori’s canvases have found their way to places like Brazil, Kenya, Germany, and South Africa. He keeps little inventory on hand and sells his work online using print-on-demand services. In the years since he’s focused on creating his digitally painted canvases, his Instagram account
has attracted almost 60,000 followers.
When he was still young, Ori moved to Maryland from Jamaica where he grew up. He eventually attended the Maryland Institute College of Art MICA for painting and later began studying design there. He says he took a lot of illustration classes. “I never let go of the painterly stuff,” he says. After studying at MICA, he found work as a designer for Graphic Audio, an audio book company based in Bethesda, Maryland, that created dramatized readings.
Contributed / John Sievers
He was working remotely for Graphic Audio when he moved to Rochester about 11 years ago. The move was prompted by his wife accepting a job at Mayo Clinic. By that time he was working mainly on illustrating covers for Graphic Audio texts. For instance, he illustrated the cover for Graphic Audio’s dramatization of national bestselling author William W. Jonstone’s “Sixkiller, U.S. Marshall,” a story that featured the character John Henry Sixkiller who fought with the 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles.
Ori says that he still gets notes online today from people who appreciate his illustrations for Graphic Audio. Many of his fans from this chapter of his career are truckers who enjoyed the audio dramatizations on their long drives.
After working for Graphic Audio for about 12 years, Ori was laid off when the company was bought out. After being laid off, he wasn’t sure he wanted to work for anyone else, despite the challenges of being an independent artist. “I decided to just do what I wanted to do,” he says. Eventually that urge led him to start his Art by Jahbu company and start creating his digitally painted canvases.
“One of my rules was to never take commissions,” says Ori. While he had enjoyed and appreciated his work illustrating and designing for Graphic Audio, Ori wanted more creative freedom. “I feel bad as an artist that an artist’s work is just work for hire. Your talent, your passion, what you spent years perfecting and honing, it just becomes a service, and I didn’t like that because I felt like I had more to say.” In his first year, Ori made about eight digital paintings that all focused on Africa and space.
One of his early digital canvases featured the high jumping Maasai tribe from Kenya and was titled “Altitude.” In its foreground is a spear-wielding Maasai with an ornate beaded head-covering and necklace with other high-jumping warriors in the background. The many layers of orange and purple clouds in the digitally-painted background are blended together like paint applied with a brush. Other paintings he’s created feature white lions, strands of DNA, and elephants. Many depict planets like Saturn, or earth with the African continent displayed, seeming small against the African figures featured in the paintings.
Ori wants his work to be accessible, and many of his large, printed canvases have starting costs of $200. He says he wants a lot of people to see his work and hopes it inspires them. As his work has become more popular, he’s begun to limit the number of prints he’ll make of a painting, sometime to 20 or 25. One of his more recent works featuring Yemoja, Goddess of Oceans, starts at $1,200. The canvas measures 32-by-40 inches. The painting took about five months to complete.
His painting of Yemoja, from the Nigerian tradition, places her in an underwater world that includes both a multitude of sea creatures like whales and octopuses, but also every planet in the solar system. “I love cramming a lot of detail in my work, so I tend to hide a lot of things,” says Ori. For those in the know, they may recognize the sea creatures in his painting of Yemoja as the fish from “Animal Crossing,” a social simulation video game from Nintendo, that he plays with his children.
While Ori says some have compared his work to Afro Futurism, he says that’s not a conscious mode for his creativity, and he sees his work stemming from his Rastafarian spirituality, his love of space, and his gaming influences. Ori says he’s come to love his new home in Rochester, and that people here remind him of the friendliness he encountered as a youth in Jamaica. He hopes he can keep making art here that will inspire others to create.
Contributed / John Sievers
Find Jahbulani Ori’s digital painting online at
