No mentor. No roadmap. No one around me doing what I was trying to do. Just a book, a skill I had since childhood, and a decision to stop drifting.

This is the honest story of how Beo Art Studio started in Yenagoa in 2019, what it actually took to build it, how many times I questioned whether it would work, and what it means that clients from the UK and US are now commissioning work from a studio that began with nothing but intuition and a drawing table.

Before the Studio — Lost Between Fashion, Music, and a Drawing Table

Before Beo Art Studio existed, I was scattered. I was into fashion, trying to be a model. I was trying music as well. I was moving between things that felt exciting but never felt like mine. And none of it was working. I kept asking myself the same question: what do I really want to do?

I was in that lost state for a while. Then I read a book, Jewish Wisdom for Business Success. It asked me to go back to the things I knew how to do growing up. The things I loved before anyone told me what I was supposed to want.

I had always loved to draw. Even before I was thinking about it as a business, I was drawing informally for people around me. The book did not give me a business plan. It gave me permission to take seriously what I already knew how to do.

From that point, I decided to start taking commissions properly. To make it real.

Why I Called It a Studio — Not Just "Benjamin's Art"

The name was a deliberate decision. Calling it a studio was a declaration, not just an artist doing things for people, but someone building a business.

The original name was not even Beo Art Studio. It was Beo Studios. The vision at that point was bigger and messier, a space where people could come in and get paintings, get tattoos, record music. All my internal worlds in one place. Everything I had been trying to do, gathered under one roof.

Over time, the focus sharpened. Beo Studios became Beo Art Studio. The art was always the strongest thing, and eventually the name reflected that.

The vision was not fully clear at the start. There were just small sparks. Little, little visions of what this could become. But that was enough to move on. You do not need to see the whole staircase. You just need enough light for the next step.

What Building a Creative Business in Yenagoa Actually Feels Like

Yenagoa gave me a playground. It is a small city, and in a small city it is easier to become known. Word travels. If you are consistent and visible, you can become the art guy in your community faster than you could in Lagos or Abuja. That early visibility mattered.

But the same smallness that helped me get known started working against me.

The environment is slow when it comes to creative spending. People are not naturally big spenders on art. You have to do a lot of convincing if your work is priced seriously. And for a long time, I found myself charging less than I should, not because I did not know my worth, but because I was thinking about what people around me could afford rather than what my growth as an artist required.

That is one of the quietest and most damaging things a creative environment can do to you. It does not attack you. It just keeps you at a ceiling. You get comfortable being the big fish in a small pond and stop swimming toward the ocean.

The moment I started thinking beyond Yenagoa, beyond Bayelsa, beyond Nigeria, everything changed.

The Hardest Thing — Nobody Around Me Could See It

One of the earliest and most persistent challenges was trying to make people around me understand the vision. Even the closest people in my life, they never really got what was in my head.

I do not blame them for that. It took me a long time to understand that it is completely unfair to expect anyone to see what you are building before you build it. Nobody can understand what is in your head until you bring it to life. Once I accepted that, I stopped needing external validation to keep going.

But the self-doubt, that was its own battle. I questioned whether this would work not once. Many times. A lot of times. Because I was doing something I had never seen anyone else do in my environment. I had no mentor. No role model for this specific path. No one I could look at and say, if they did it, I can too.

I was building from pure intuition. From the way I think. From a quiet certainty that this was right even when nothing around me confirmed it.

That is a lonely place to build from. But it is also where the most original things come from.

The First International Payment and What It Changed

The moment a client from abroad paid for a commission, I could not believe it.

I told everyone around me. Look at what just happened. Not in arrogance. In genuine disbelief and joy. Someone outside Nigeria, someone who had never met me, who had no shared community with me, had found my work, trusted it, and paid for it.

It did not just feel good. It reframed everything.

I was no longer looking at Nigeria as the ceiling. I was looking at the whole world as the market. One small thing I started in Yenagoa had reached across borders. A global phenomenon is a strong phrase but that is exactly how it felt, and it still feels that way every time it happens.

Diaspora clients, UK commissions, US commissions, all of it followed. And each one reinforced the same truth: the internet has no geography. Quality finds its audience regardless of where the artist is sitting when they make the work.

How the Founder Mindset Shifted

In the early days, my approach to clients was simple: as long as someone was going to pay, I would take the work. Any client, any brief, any price. I needed the commissions and I was not in a position to be selective.

That has changed completely.

Now I only work with people who believe in the vision. Clients who love art, who are willing to engage with the process, who understand what they are commissioning and why it matters to them. I am not looking to work with everybody. I am looking for the right people.

I have also transitioned from being reactive, waiting for things to happen, taking whatever came — to operating as a founder. Guiding the direction. Making deliberate decisions about what the studio takes on, who it serves, and where it is going.

The energy now is going toward building something that others can learn from. Mentoring fellow artists. Creating tools that help artists price their work and help clients visualise their commissions. Building systems that make the studio work rather than just the artist work.

That shift from artist to founder, is the biggest single change between 2019 and now.

What I Would Do Differently Starting from Zero Today

If I was starting Beo Art Studio from nothing today with only my skill, the first thing I would do is exactly what I did then — create an Instagram page and start posting. But I would be far more intentional about it. Right captions. Consistent output. Pushing across TikTok and every platform available from day one.

Social media is free leverage. It is the single most powerful tool available to a creative starting from zero and most people underuse it because they are not intentional with it. They post when they feel like it. They caption without thinking. They share the work but not the story behind it.

The first six months I would spend working as hard as possible online — sharing every finished piece, educating people about what the studio does and what makes it different, building the community before I needed it to buy from me.

And I would not scatter my energy the way I did before. No fashion detour. No music chapter. Straight to the thing I already knew how to do. Six months of focused, intentional online presence would have built the early client base much faster than I managed to in reality.

The other thing I would tell myself: stop thinking about what the people around you can afford. Think about what your work is worth. Those are two completely different conversations and conflating them will keep you stuck longer than anything else will.

Where Beo Art Studio Is Now

The studio is still in Yenagoa. Still taking portrait commissions, painting murals, doing live events, shipping work internationally, building tools for artists and clients, and exhibiting when the right opportunities come.

Beo Studios, that vague, multi-directional idea from 2019,  has become something focused, intentional, and globally reaching. The vision is clearer now than it has ever been. And it is still growing.

If you are an artist somewhere in Nigeria right now in the same lost state I was in before 2019, trying different things, questioning everything, wondering if the creative path is real, this studio exists as proof that it is. You just have to go back to what you already know how to do and start.

If you want to work with Beo Art Studio, portrait commissions, murals, live event painting, start the conversation here.

And if you are an artist still figuring out what to charge for your work, use our free Art Cost Calculator to build a pricing structure you can stand behind.