Beautiful Maidens: Frank Dei’s Painted Pots

Visitors to the Golf Park in Achimota, Ghana, cannot fail to notice Frank Dei’s beautifully painted pots, which transform the serene environment of the park into a variegated landscape of evocative forms and colours. Presented in pairs and arranged in several rows and columns, the wide range of pots on display beckon to prospective buyers like beautiful maidens flirting with suitors. Dei’s flowerpot business is reflective of the entrepreneurial spirit of many young Africans, especially in developing countries, who strive to cope with scarce job opportunities and high unemployment rates.

Frank Dei is neither a potter nor a trained painter in the academic sense of the word. His first experience with colour occurred in an automobile body workshop where he trained as a paint sprayer. However, Dei has found in earthenware pots a new painting ground – one that holds immense creative possibilities and allows him to explore the evocative and aesthetic qualities of colour. Generally, Dei’s painted pots perform a balancing act in which pottery, painting and entrepreneurship complement one another. Within the context of this relationship, Dei navigates In her analysis of the attitudes towards selling art between these two categories of artists, Sidney Kasfir states that “artists working in cooperatives have a clear goal when they make something – it is to be sold. Its commodity status is therefore unambiguous at all stages in the creation process.”