When he was an art student at the Royal Drawing School in London, one of Jamiu Agboke’s teachers identified him as a landscape painter. “You just don’t see it yet,” he recalls being told. Years later, surrounded by colorful visions of lush waterfalls and forests in his bright East London studio, he has clearly found his calling. “The change happened like a wound healing,” he explains, adding how his figures gradually receded. “The landscapes have always been there. I only just noticed them as my practice deepened.”

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Agboke moved to the U.K. for school when he was 10 years old and has been there ever since. Though he has always lived in a metropolis, his paintings only show mountains and deserts. “Landscapes give me a better entry point than people or other subject matter, which I find a bit more difficult to access,” he says. “Maybe because I like a lot of silent time by myself to think.” And while he loves getting out of town to go on hikes, none of the places he depicts are real. All are fictional scenes that draw on his love of being in nature. It’s incredible to see someone working in a post-industrial space and imagining such terrain when the view out the window is one of rooftops, chimneys, and cloudy grey skies. Natural, overcast light from a huge window illuminates the way the paint sits a bit uneasily, sheen and layered on in a visible way, atop the smoothness of the metal. The oil paint’s support is a revelation: Until a couple of years ago, the painter worked on canvas, but now his compositions are nearly all done on aluminum and copper.

Working on such a medium requires a quick brush, but Agboke does not sketch or plan much in advance. Because the surface is not porous, it drives him to focus on the moment. “Once the marks are there, there’s no going back,” he explains. “It’s unforgiving. Or you have to wipe back and start over.” And so the process of making becomes part of the subject. He describes the painted views like weather. Paintings can be a cool, gloomy day, or an autumn scene with soft sunlight, or a glowing yellow clearing in the middle of a forest on the first day of spring. The small oil-on-copper Skin Boat, 2025, shows a little sailing vessel adrift on water, the brushstrokes quick and flowing, the hues golden and summery. The weather is the mood, the atmosphere, the subject almost, and when he describes having to start over, he says, “It’s the weather’s fault.”