Vivien Tapsoba

Born in Burkina Faso, West Africa / Works in Worcester, MA

BIO

Vivien Tapsoba was born on February 21, 1984, in one of the popular neighborhoods of the city of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. Vivien Tapsoba is a self-taught painter. He currently lives and works in the United States of America. Vivien's career began at an early age. After his primary schooling, he continued his studies at the Lycee Philippe Zinda KABORE (Burkina Faso). This transition to secondary school was of very short duration because his love for art took precedence over the general studies of high school.He threw himself into music and painting with a larger part of his time for painting. He decided to take training courses to achieve his painting goals. He started drawing in 2000 at the National Center for Handicraft Art (CNAA) in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). Vivien has exhibited nationally and internationally in the United States and in Africa.

In the year 2001, he joined the OLORUN foundation where he began to paint and develop shapes and color mixtures with as coach painter named Bouba Konseibo. After five years spent with the OLORUN Foundation where he strengthened the dissertation of researchers in the framework of the artistic process, He finally found his painting style and realized finally one of his first collective exhibitions (the new wave) in 2005. In the course of the same year, several opportunities are open to him. He animated the workshop of the residents of the detention center of the miners of Laiye (Burkina Faso) and is illustrated as one of the artists selected for the second edition of the project “50 LIONS 50 artists” in the city of Lyon in France, designed in Burkina Faso and exposed in Lyon at the “place de la "Republique”. Apart from the OLORUN Foundation, where everything started well for him, he has established himself and makes other meetings and contacts in order to mature his artistic palette. He took part in the contest of Dak’Art in Senegal after being preselected by a competition organized by the Ministry of Culture of Burkina Faso in 2006.

His philosophy of art resounds as an encounter with oneself, where the artist learns every day to control his emotions on the canvas from his world which is out of the ordinary and that we cannot express sometimes with the words often related to the world, the culture, or the society in which we are attached. It is by the expression of the harmony of colors on his canvases that the schemas of the creation of Vivien TAPSOBA were born little by little. From the erasure to the reconstruction of figures that give shape to some elements that appear on his paintings that represent most characters, animals or signs related to the story told on the canvas. The painting style of the artist is determined between figurative, and Expressionism and the themes often come from the nature of each painting; just a way to give a free field of vision to art lovers to find their own reading of things, the painting technique used on these paintings is called mixed technique.