Ghana Movie Poster Ghana Hand Painted African cinema Once Upon A Chinese Hero

This is not a print ! its a real oil paint !

A unique piece of Authentic African Art !

Hand painted Ghana movie posters are unique pieces of Authentic African Art!

These types of posters were exhibited many times in museums all over the world and are highly collectible!

Here is a little about the origin of this form of art.

With the arrival of video and video cassettes during  the 1980s in Ghana (West Africa), a small-scale film distribution mobile Cinema was created.

The local operators were equipped with a television, a video and occasionally with a portable generator. They were moving from place to place showing their films - sometimes inside social clubs or houses and during the night in the open air!

To gather as many spectators as possible, they had to advertise their business and they needed huge posters. Because of this, a new form of art was born.

Talented artists after viewing the films were creating large-size posters using oil paint on canvas, but because of the unavailability and high cost of the imported canvases, the artists were using used flour sacks sewn together.

The artist had the freedom to add and change scenes seen, or not seen, in the movie to make the poster more attractive. This is the reason that this hand-painted posters are considered more ART than the usual posters. Each of them is UNIQUE and except for the film content, they express the vision of the artist himself.

Because of the poster's "hard" life (transported folded or rolled, displayed under the rain and sun for several months during their rounds all over Ghana) most of the posters were destroyed and the surviving ones have been damaged at the ends of the canvas, peelings, cracking, and other signs of wear.

By the mid-1990s, since television and video were more widely available in Ghana, the popularity of the mobile Cinema business declined and almost collapsed.

The profits of the mobile Cinema operators decreased, and they were not able to afford the "expensive" artists to paint their posters anymore.

At present days they are using photocopy paper posters in order to cut cost and survive.

For more information concerning this type of art please read: "Extreme Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Poster from Ghana" with over 350 colorful examples of these unique posters.