Ablade Glover’s Trotro Station, 2020 [October Gallery/Jonathan Greet]

IT was Ablade Glover’s exuberant canvases celebrating urban African life that immediately caught the eye of a newly opened gallery in Bloomsbury seeking to showcase a different kind of art four decades ago.

The ensuing exhibition at the October Gallery proved a turning point for Glover, who has gone on to enjoy international acclaim for his work as well as found a gallery of his own in his native Ghana, while the October itself has achieved prominence for its pioneering role in championing art rarely seen in Europe.

It has been an especially close relationship and earlier this month Glover, still going strong at 90, flew from his home in Accra to attend the opening of his 10th solo show there, Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys, a display of new works portraying markets and bus parks, townscapes and restless crowds via his signature thick palette-knife strokes and rich oil colours. Large in scale and brimming with energy, their apparent abstraction invites you to take a closer look and it is then that the picture begins to take shape.

“People say my work is abstract but for me it is a reality – I paint what is around me,” Glover tells me, looking relaxed and remarkably youthful as we sit in the gallery’s pretty, light-filled courtyard.

“What fascinates me is what I call ‘bassa bassa’ – meaning unplanned, disorderly. Nobody queues in Ghana, whether it is in the market place, tro-tro park [bus station] or bank. But in that bassa bassa there is order, there is beauty, and that is what I’m looking for. It has always fascinated me and I’m still looking for it.”

Ablade Glover [Angela Cobbinah]

In a career also devoted to mentoring a new generation of artists as an educator and curator, Glover’s work has been exhibited internationally and found itself in prestigious collections and gracing the likes of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and the Unesco HQ in Paris. So it is a surprise to discover that his interest in art came by chance while he was training to be a teacher in the 1950s.

“Part of the course required attending art classes and one of my tutors kept telling me how good my paintings were. That’s when I began thinking of myself as an artist and I later retrained as an art teacher.”

As he talks about the trajectory of his artistic journey in his quiet, unassuming way, it seems he’s had the knack of always being in the right place at the right time, not least coming of age during the independence era when opportunity and hope abounded.

First off, a visiting textile specialist from London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts, now Central St Martins, spotted his artwork during teacher training and encouraged him to sit the entrance exam for its textile design course. To his astonishment he was accepted but, having no money, he was unable to take it up.

Lady Fortune waved her magic wand again with a newspaper ad looking for would-be trainees with an art background to staff a planned textile factory. “I applied and when I told the interviewer I had already been offered a place at Central I was given a scholarship to go there.”

Glover, whose Artistic Alliance Gallery in Accra was opened by former UN chief Kofi Annan in 2008, spent three fruitful years in London, arriving back in Ghana only to find that the factory had not yet been built. He resolved to return to the UK to take a course in art education at Newcastle University, hoping to raise money towards it from sales of his work at an exhibition he was organising in Accra. Much to his surprise, the head of Ghana broadcasting, Shirley Graham Du Bois, agreed to open it.

Then one day she told him that “Osagyefo”, President Kwame Nkrumah, wanted to see him there and then at his offices. “Why, I didn’t know, and I felt scared. But after telling him about my plans I walked out of there with a scholarship and within a week I was in Newcastle.”

It was at Newcastle that another little miracle that took place during a teaching practice placement. “A teacher was watching me paint and said I would get better results using a palette knife rather than a paintbrush. So I took up the knife and almost immediately I could feel it was part of me. It transformed my whole approach to painting and I’ve never looked back.”

Returning to Ghana in 1965, he taught fabric design and printing before going off to the US to gain more academic qualifications and then settling down to teach at the College of Art, University of Kumasi.

“Throughout, painting remained my passion and I became prolific because the palette is fast. Accra was being built up rapidly and I painted a lot of buildings and people working on them, some figures and a few market women.”

There came a few more shows locally and in Nigeria. Then in 1982 following a chance encounter with a British Council official, he was given the opportunity of exhibiting in the UK – at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden.

The October Gallery, a one-time Victorian school­house still in the process of being refurbished, was to be the next stop.

“For me it was beautiful, it was home,” Glover continues with an easy smile. “This where I wanted my work to be. I was at the beginning but felt very encouraged because people seemed to like my work.”

From that point his work developed in leaps and bounds and by his own account, even as the acknowledged master of the palette knife and oil paint, is continuing to do so.

“I am becoming braver, more confident,” he declares as if he were just starting over again.

“Now I don’t care what anybody says and if it is not correct I just scrape it off. I get what I want to get.”

• Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys: Ablade Glover at 90 runs until August 3 at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, WC1N 3AL