This article was originally published on X on July 11, 2025. Join the discussion: https://x.com/24_Hours_Art/status/1943695840331366557
"I was a nylon bag in the wind."
That's how Adewale Mayowa describes his life before art: floating wherever life took him, following the prescribed Nigerian path of school, medical degree, marriage, children, death. But as medical school neared its end, something inside him revolted. "I already imagined that I wasn't going to be fulfilled."
Unlike artists who discover their calling through childhood sketches, Mayowa came to art through crisis. No sketchbooks filled his youth. He'd given up on drawing comics, even basic biology sketches, because the results fell short of his standards.
Everything changed in his final year of medical school. Watching a classmate develop as an artist made him realize that skill wasn't innate. It was earned through practice. That simple revelation ignited something primal.
The Experiment
Armed with @RobertGreene's Mastery, Mayowa launched into methodical chaos. The book's core message resonated: every person carries a unique essence that exists nowhere else in humanity, and expressing it fully is both personal calling and collective necessity. "I tried everything: drawing, modeling, dance, acting, poetry, photography, digital painting." His approach: try something for days, assess the resonance, keep what called to him, discard the rest. All while finishing medical school and working hospital shifts.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Mayowa lost his hospital job in early 2020. What seemed like a devastating blow became an unexpected gift. "That was when the vision started getting clearer." Without the safety net of medical work, he was forced to commit fully. The transformation had begun.
Beyond Language
What emerged was an artist who defies categorization. Mayowa calls himself a "Visual Alchemist" practicing "Surreal Introspection." His work blends meticulously detailed symbology with surrealist concepts, exploring identity and the subconscious through painstaking detail. His ballpoint pen drawings take countless hours to complete, built through countless tiny strokes.
But perhaps most intriguing is his obsession with pre-verbal communication. "What would the world look like if we didn't evolve speech, but instead evolved telepathic communication?"
He draws an unexpected parallel to speaking in tongues, a phenomenon he witnessed growing up Pentecostal in Nigeria. Years of listening to Alan Watts and smoking weed had prepared him to look beyond the surface. While outsiders might dismiss speaking in tongues as mere nonsense, he recognizes something I've also found in Watts' teachings: there are states of being where feeling overwhelms language's capacity to contain it.
This fascination infuses his art. "Sometimes I have no idea what exactly I'm holding. But I know it is something, and it's trying to say something." The floating orbs, geometric patterns, and repeated figures in his work operate in this pre-verbal space. They're not meant to be decoded but experienced as communications from somewhere deeper.
The Digital Art Revolution
Mayowa's artistic awakening coincided with the NFT boom, providing an answer to a fundamental question: how to make a living from personal expression without compromise. "I wanted to be free to create my own stories. And somehow, that was going to lead to getting paid."
The blockchain offered revolutionary concepts: collectors anywhere could support his work directly, and provenance became "a stamp in time that you were here and made this piece at this particular point."
His first major sale felt like "confirmation from the universe that yes, I am on the right path." But success brought unexpected challenges. "After the money started coming, I kind of started making art to get more money and applause," he admits. The work remained true to his ethos, but seeking validation was slowly robbing him of essence.
Through market ups and downs, Mayowa learned to abandon external validation, returning to art as pure self-expression.
Digital Futures, Ancient Questions
Today, Mayowa sees himself at another transition. His work moves from strictly physical into hybrid digital spaces, merging all his explorations— ballpoint pen, 3D, photography, videography— into animated works. He speaks of humanity building "this world into a very large computer" with a "meta-consciousness arising."
As a 21st-century artist, he feels called to work in digital mediums while exploring blends of physical and digital. Future plans include sculptures and installations that merge both realms, though he admits he's still figuring out that vision.
"I have this crazy idea that the world can actually be better if every individual flourishes to their fullest potential," he says. By pursuing his most authentic vision, refusing to sacrifice uniqueness for universality, Mayowa creates art he hopes will endure. "While I'm alive, maybe just a few hundred people might engage. But after I die, more people will be born who resonate."
The Language Before Words
In Pentecostal churches across Nigeria, believers speak in tongues. To outsiders, it sounds like nonsense. But Mayowa sees something else entirely: people so overwhelmed by feeling that conventional language fails them. They reach for sounds beyond syntax, meaning beyond words.
"Sometimes I have no idea what exactly I'm holding," he says of his own work. "But I know it is something, and it's trying to say something."
This is the space Mayowa inhabits. Between precision and mystery. Between the digitally exact and the spiritually ineffable. His symbols float like untranslatable prayers. His figures dissolve and reform like thoughts before language crystallizes them into limitation.
The alchemy he practices isn't just visual. It's linguistic, spiritual, temporal. He transforms the pre-verbal into the visible, the fleeting into the permanent, the personal into the universal. Each ballpoint stroke becomes a syllable in a language that doesn't exist yet, archived on the blockchain for minds that haven't been born yet.
The alchemy transforms the alchemist. Each piece changes how he sees, which changes what he creates, which changes him again— an endless recursive loop of becoming.
He's no longer that nylon bag in the wind. Now he's become something harder to name. Medium and message. Channel and transmission. The one who makes visible what was never meant for words.
The work accumulates, patient as prayer. Waiting for its congregation to arrive. Waiting for the moment when what cannot be said finally finds those who can hear it anyway.
@adewalemayowa_ suggests these artists for future episodes of Weekly Dose of ART: Supervillain @bad_oats , Mediolanum @mediolanum666 , and Chewy Stoll @chowzuh