James Adebayo

Adebayo Eniola James also know as James Crowned (b. 1996) is a Nigerian Self-taught Artist. Holds an O.N.D in Mass Communication from the Kwara State Polytechnic. His practice is primarily centered around hyper realistic drawings with pencil, charcoal and paste on paper and large canvas. He fell in love with hyper realism due to his eye defect, at the age of 8 he was diagnose of an eye disease called cataract, which left him totally one eye blinded. Until 2007,  at the age of 11 when the government did a free eye operation service where his eye was operated on, but he never seems to see the same again, ever since then he has been seeing in doubles, and it has been said that nothing can be done to correct that again. 

James even though as fall in love with art at a very tender age started drawing professionally in 2016 after his encounter with some artists on Facebook the likes of Kelvin Okafor, and J. D Hill Berry, and due to his eyes seeing one thing as two things, he challenge himself to do what seem to be impossible with his eye and chose hyper realism as a form of art to express himself, and ever since then he has been obsessed with details in his art, and trained himself in art with countless number of YouTube videos and follows other artist work in progress on Social media. 

James drives at creating art which depict the relationship between man and his creator, his society, his actions and consequences. He is mostly interested in human body language, facial expression and hand gesture for his subject of art, as he spawn to create art that shows figurative identification of the mind and feeling of people, he most times put himself in the shoe of different situation to create is art, He love to create an emotional connection between his works and his audience, He love his art to have its own voice he said “Times and times again words has failed me in explaining my works to people, so I tell them to look at it and listen to what it saying, and quite a number of people tells me what I couldn’t express in words, I believe my works explains itself to people more than I do”. Sometimes He also loves to gives a little twist to is art by creating an illusion mixed with hyper realism.   

James made his debut art exhibition in 2017, BL art exhibition 2017 in Ilorin, Kwara State. In 2017 he organized an open art fair at Palms Mall Ilorin tagged Art-Attack 2017, which brought artists together to make live drawing for people, intended to raise funds for Street Kids, to go to school. His drawing “Only the Brave” was featured in an American poet book titled Poetic depth: Chronicles of a Hueman in 2020

Within the space of 2016 to 2020 he has created more than 10 hyper realistic artwork among is “Music in my vein”, “Fearless”, “Only the brave”, “Save me”, “Make me a believer”, “Thy Sword”, “Innocent”, “A winkle in smile”, and many more