Getting started
Observing
requires more than the current features you look in say the face of a fellow
being. Observing demands a deeper and a closer look at the subject at hand. It
requires that 'behind' story of the subject's past which could tell whether the
current him is an effect of the cause 'past'. Only when you have uncovered
those hidden stories in the subject's life can you say that you have actually
'seen'.
It
is about 10 in the night. No moonlight no street lights. And about the street
lights, I am currently not trekking on a street so
you don't expect street
lights. Only the occasional security lights in several homes as I pass by the
road. Actually not several homes but about two or three, so far I have only
passed one otherwise the better part has been me and my feet knocking galleys,
pebbles and sometimes sliding on sand.
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| A side view of the entrance to Dianga's Esiepala Cultural Center (1982) |
I
am the only one on the road and I can’t help but wonder why no one else is out
tonight. A tingling sensation holds the back of my head when I see something
crawling on the road with such a sound as that of a whirling polythene paper
when it is blown by the wind. I am scared. But I laugh at myself and at the
paper and the wind too.
I
am not afraid I say to myself and immediately other whirling scares me this
time almost making me lose hold on ground. I mark a smile and continue walking.
It is only a matter of minutes before I reach where I am headed and all this
will be away from me.
Though
I refuse to believe it, I can hear a sound of an owl somewhere out there but
very close to me. Death I think, but I don't want to believe it. It reminds me
of what I have just said a few minutes ago.
"If
I passed on tomorrow, I will at least have presented my invention to you
people." And I start doubting the power of the words in that sentence.
After a presentation that has taken a long 30 minutes and needless to say,
'pissed of' many of them, that was the only way I have seen fit for a
conclusion?
Something
in me hates myself and I feel a formidable heap of guilt. I keep on telling
myself that that is my first and last long presentation, but I am not convinced
at all.
"I
couldn't stop myself," I say to myself, "I can't."
And
though vaguely I see myself in the future on other platforms presenting for as
long as I please. Creating my own audience. I have to do it, I convince my
mind.
I
am panting remarkably and there has to be some sweat under my armpits but it's
no worry because I am finally home. The first thing I do is take out that shirt
I requested the audience to sign. Looks like my marker pen did a little favor,
it only gave ink to those who were attentive and denied the 'pissed-of' lot.
The guilt is slowly waning.
I
spot a familiar line, 'Everything is Best for Business' which makes me smile
and stupefies me into nostalgia. The 'LOL' of Chiqq makes me laugh and reminds
me of the future that my subconscious mind has been planning for she and I. I
am still in the first stages on this.
But
I know for certain that I am never going to die soon, I must accomplish these things.
That is inevitable.
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| One of Dianga's paintings on display at his Esiepala Gallery |
Routine
For
quite a remarkable number of days (about four months) I must have acquired a
trait that could make you describe me as a creature of habits. Only these
habits will turn to be as distinguished from the habits of others of my kind as
the sky is from the earth. Of my kind here not only to mean those that are in
the pursuit of my course but also those of my peer. I must say that I am not in
any way to the inclination that there are better routines to follow in our lives
and that mine is the best. Neither am I scraping off the importance of
extensive social life. Think of it as a priority case scenario; a comprehensive
study of one’s assets and how far the assets can be stretched without strain
and keeping away liabilities. To a person, another person’s liability could be
an asset holding the vice versa.
Someone
of my kind mentioned hypothetically that we were meant to work in the night.
Followed by a chuckle, I could give quite a convincing factual record to anchor
the truth of the statement given the obvious reason that most artists want to
work in an ideally peaceful environment such as the one offered in the night.
Circumstantial reasons mean that the artist works in environments not ideal
which only means that adaptation is very handy if an artist is to achieve good
results given any kind of environment.
Now
to the trait. It is much of a circumstantial habit than it is a real habit and
it is simply a long walk through the wild to some ideal environment (to me) and
once again a lazy walk back to my place of residence. It involves following a
lonely path (only about an average of ten people have been to my eye for all
that time I have used it). The path leads to an arable community land on which
bushes are characteristic features and much of it gives the guava population a
hand. My hand grabs a couple or two fruits regularly keeping a reality check.
Grazers
come to my vicinity often and during the first days of my expeditions there
were several people, of the aged population who could be seen digging sand and
carrying it in buckets across to the reach of the carrier pick-up vehicles.
These don’t do what they used to do anymore since erosion has made it so that
not enough sand can be sourced from the area which right now if it were zoomed
into the screen of a camera, would resemble an arid area.
Some
granite stones tentatively arranged onto some few heaps catch my eye since they
show sequential cuts around them. I thought at first that some artist of my
kind must have spent some time inscribing impressions on the hard stone, only
for a confirmation from a grazer that that was really not intended for it was
during the transportation of the stone that the inscriptions came to be.
Just
before I cross the road to my ideal environment, I usually (or at least in the
last few rainy days) have to hold my breath for a while and keep my eyes off
the women to my right-hand side who are in the scraping-scales business. If I
were given a live fish and were to cook, I wouldn’t have to hold my breath.
I
was never among the first persons to discover this place and I was definitely
not in the formula when the idea of coming up with such a place was conceived.
Mine was only a late-comer and at the same time an early-comer in the sense
that I came at a time when not many people (or none) were coming. It is not a
good place maybe to many people since they might have been led to think that
some environments are too hostile (in whatever ways) or maybe their priorities
led them into seeing a second spent in such an environment as a second wasted. Yet
others have discovered the association this environment has with romance. To
such every second counts and for those in meditation, every millisecond is a
real asset. Some just come for horizontal explorations.
It
is an environment that has been developed independently and ideally by the
artist. Its sobriety only suggests the riches behind a creative mind and its
simplicity adds to the young artist’s list of an ideal environment.
Art
grabs and distorts society as it pleases. Artists talk not of themselves but of
any other and every other person in the society. Art is a cleansing department;
it takes all the bad of the society, shows it for what it is and renders it to
what it should be. Art makes people fall in love but it does not itself fall in
love. Behind its eye you will notice a longing; a hint of loneliness and a
sense of a system made up of independent subsets all of which play a pivotal
role in the whole.
Visual
art could arguably be the most difficult art one can ever achieve fully, making
it the most difficult subject in human studies. It is in most ways given a
place in society that it does not and should not claim. Its achievement
requires equivalent input in terms of time and resources (money). Just like the
way the artiste or the film developer pumps in from their pockets seed capital
to eventually have that music that plays in your phone wherever you may be, or
that good movie you included in your list of your favorites so does the artist
put in maybe even much more money to have some pieces of art on canvases or
some sculptures on stone.
“But
before the money returns…” some people say. I say that too. I wonder, rather.
However, to those who have discovered the limitless world of visual art, it is
never a question in their diaries. It is just a positive answer.
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| One of the many Diang'as outdoor sculptures around his home in Maseno, Kenya |
Africa: is it the ideal Environment?
No
one chooses their existence and especially where the entirety of the existence
is spent. They are just informed as soon as they grow enough and need to belong
that where they spend their lives in is what it is and what it is called. That
information, I am inclined to believe, is meant to bring some awareness to the
subject’s mind of what there is in his reach. What there is not only comes in when
the growing creature discovers that they could have some things that others of
their peer (whom they have met informally or formally in learning institutions)
don’t have or they themselves lack what their counterparts have. The situation
gives to the guardian a hard task of explanation of some certain factual rules
that hold in life and the reasons thereof.
If
the guardian happens to be in the brackets of the have-nots and does not show
the young creature any effort as to suggest acceptance, confidence and pride in
what and who they are, and if the young creature sees those traits in their
counterpart, intelligent perception has it that the young creature is inclined
to think that having is the ideal way to go about life. And sure is, only that
the young creature does not even give the slightest thought to what they and
the guardian could have. Maybe the apparent ‘I don’t have’ in the guardian’s
expression statements implants the guilty conscious in the young creature’s
mind. What they do have does not matter anymore. Maybe if the guardian gave an
alternative of achieving the same thing that the young creature for example
wanted without necessarily sighting the fact that the counterpart had money and
hence could have the same thing easily, the young creature could somehow
discover his potential and trigger his intelligence to achieve by any means.
I
have come to learn that I do not have to have a heap of canvases in order to
produce good work in paint. Previously some people used to tell me such things
as ‘Paint on canvas really is appealing and it is normally for those who are
good at it.” That statement is demeaning in itself since first I did not at the
moment have the power to acquire the ‘canvas’ and at the same time I was not
that good. In fact not good at all in as far as painting was concerned, but I
had at least some confidence that I would do something given any surface. I
made paper work for me as well as recycled chip-boards, hard-boards and
plywood. That meant that when the ‘haves’ said they could paint, I also was in
the equation and could (though to some weird standards) be picked out from the
crowd.
Argumentative
expressions have been presented in different avenues and media concerning what
really signs African art. It could be anything that presents wildlife, right?
Or some dark scenarios of witchcraft. Perhaps the one that has intrigued me
most is one suggesting that a painting by an African artist made of acrylics on
canvas sounds very Western. It goes on to add that if it were something like
pigmented cow dung, it could spell out Africa in many ways.
Some young Kenyan artists have recently made a website which they called Kenyan Art.com in the intention of marketing their works. They had to resort to some kind of classification, in as far as the target market was concerned, that required they gave some short explanation of what say portraiture is. They sighted Mona Lisa as an example of a portrait and I had to confront them about it giving my backbone of reasoning the fact that the website was about Kenyan art.
Some young Kenyan artists have recently made a website which they called Kenyan Art.com in the intention of marketing their works. They had to resort to some kind of classification, in as far as the target market was concerned, that required they gave some short explanation of what say portraiture is. They sighted Mona Lisa as an example of a portrait and I had to confront them about it giving my backbone of reasoning the fact that the website was about Kenyan art.
Well,
while most of the young artists could show some trait of the amateur who wants
to sell really high, there could be a problem in the art world that we either
have ignored or otherwise discovered it and decided to live with it anyhow. It
could explain why such artists as Mutu Wangeci, who is based at Brooklyn in the
US and whose ranking at artprice.com in the list of the top 500 highest selling
artists in the year 2013/2014 set her apart as the only Kenyan (at number 374),
said in a newspaper article that she left her homeland since she could not find
mentors in her art endeavors. Whether or not her works will showcase her early
childhood life in Kenya will not erase a US product in the analysis of truly
Kenyan artists.
While
the artist is influenced in the course of his journey by many external sources
and holding to the obvious fact of a sophisticated today artist; one who is
neither instinctive nor a loner, there will always be a mark either hidden or
conspicuous in their work of their true identity in as far as their background
is concerned.
To
answer some of the most challenging questions that always will pop up in the
life of the young artist creature especially one that is born in this
equatorial part of the world, questions that could be hard to get answers and
which act as gate-ways to discovering the creature’s potentials, abilities and
resources put in place, I think it is really a wise option to source out some
individuals who have flourished in the same area before and for long. Such
individuals are the kind that is referred to as the masters. And these
individuals should not be any masters, rather they should be those that can as
mentioned before be separated from or have themselves separated themselves from
the crowd. They are individuals who have sighted the strongholds of art-Africa
and used those strongholds to their advantage. And have of course eventually
achieved remarkably.
You
may not come across their names in those books that focus on the artists based
in the urban areas. It will never happen. Kenya is not all urban after all. And
you may be surprised at how being un-urban really overcomes urban.
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| One of Dianga's linocuts. This is entitled 'The Bird of The Shrine' |
Seeing
Given
different conditions, a normal human being’s vision is segmented and documented
to retain its own individuality. We all are exposed to the same subjects of
vision but the information presented by each of us will show lots of
disparities in terms of what we saw and its relevance. Majority of the race
just see, process the data and either does not present it formally or simply
keeps it to themselves. After all they might have seen what to them is simply a
set-up in nature which is ‘God-given’ and therefore nothing remarkable a man
can do in an effort to either manipulate the set-up to their use or to distort
it for some good or bad purpose. The other part of the race sees and recognizes
the potential the set-up contains to the advantage of the race. They know there
has to be something that can be done about it. The rest and the least of the
race actually do something significant about it.
Such
a group is extremely important in preservation of the race’s culture and
heritage. That very group is a representation of an evolution of the human
brain. It could be the inventor. The intellect, name them. But in each of the
individual you do mention I see a common denominator in all of them:
creativity.
The
writer brings what they see or can be seen in nature to paper to satisfy the
individual with the emotion the writer claims at his association with his
environment. He is solely judged only on the bases on how skillfully he
captures his audience and since the audience itself is capable of experiencing
the same environment first-hand, his creativity in seeing and capturing aspects
in his surrounding that will be to his audience a surprise and hence develop
more interest. A good song writer and a poet should see his subject of
discussion first before resorting to the content thereof. An extensive poem
will always appeal to the audience than a shallow one; remember at some point
every normal human being is an artist.
It
therefore holds that anyone can actually be able to have on paper what is in
their surrounding that is, everyone is capable of drawing keeping the argument
of talent away. Talent only is a secondary consideration and an incentive in as
far as drawing is concerned. Otherwise we can all learn how to draw.
This
is all in the basics of each subject to-be achieved.
A
successful artist, however, is one who with passion sees drawing as a means of
expression. It is he that sees what all other human beings don’t. And if there
is a precious gift worth possessing is having that artistic eye. If that kind
of human being has mastered the skill of capturing nature and presenting it
without defection in the intelligent perception of the rest of the race, then
that kind of a being has reached at a point of command of his subject. Whatever
he does to it only sides to his advantage. And consequently the audience will
involuntarily follow him for it knows him and has placed him in its books.
To
such an artist, what he says he has done on canvas becomes. And in most cases
the canvas speaks for itself.
Now
what if a human being does some seemingly distorted drawings of objects in
nature and claims that his world only exists in abstraction? While there could
be some truth in that, the audience shall always question that truth. And
believe me conviction will not be an easy to earn task. It doesn’t matter the
theories the artist shall use, the intelligent perception of the audience shall
think otherwise. Hiding himself in the comfortable playground of his rival-the
commanding artist- shall be the easiest escape for him. And that will be
untruthful by all means.
Artists
see what others of the race don’t, but in order to capture that part of the
race (which is the majority) the artist has to convince them that he surely can
see what they themselves see without straining.
Some
of these truths only give to the subject of art a solid foundation without
which the artist shall be digging the wrong hole.
These
truths are however not presented to majority of the artists especially in Kenya
where the art education was scraped off the syllabus. It could explain the
demeaning corner the art subject has been placed among majority of the
population.
Ideally
the subject of art is simply mastery of the basics through practice and
commitment. If one accomplishes in that task, then one is free to use that
knowledge to his liking. But in whatever he does, the basics must be seen. Some
of these basics present themselves in rules and they include perspective,
placement, proportion, pattern and planes. A serious artist is able to take
that road to perfection and hence command. We will not then have to question
whether he really has seen.
The Background and Growth
I should have known. I should have waned
my then bruised ego away at least for a while. My ears should have commanded a
brain-attention; a brain hearing. Otherwise I could not have found myself in
regret and disguised depression. My passion could still be ablaze and all
around me be my peace of mind. Security. That feeling that makes you behave
normally. Wake up every day and follow the designated/the adapted routine, away
from which you would show something close to a cancer ordeal or dementia.
Remorse has opened my memory pages, only
those about the subject matter anyway. I cannot help but accept the defeat that
lies massively on what I believe to be my heart, with autonomy. He has been
telling me over and over again. And with a hint of emphasis and a bright eye,
“Don’t go out selling your painting even when the paint has not dried yet.” That
what kills most young artists is simply being impatient.
This thing. This thing for money and
this thing; money. Those born, like him. Shortly before independence and have
lived through post-independence to-date have the money evolution on their
finger-tips. From the times when pennies were only available and could only be
earned from a lucky opportunity of working for a European either a missionary
or a colonialist to the times when bread was ten cents and now when a loaf is
hardly an every-day break-fast ingredient. Not that there is any change in its
nutrient content that would make one eradicate it from their healthy-diet list,
but the cost. Money. Sacrifice sh.50 everyday or eat the previous night left
over- some piece of ugali (which is very close to the loaf of bread by the way
in terms of nutrient content).
“There is no money in art,” he has told
me not once or twice. There is a huge painting on a certain wall and the price
is sh.400 000. That to me is money. I cannot therefore comprehend why there is
no money in art.
It is due to that thing that I embarked
on a risky mission, one led by impulses rather. I just wanted something and I
did not know what. Something like feeling what they feel when they walk in a
gallery in town and coincidentally are graced with their works hanging on the
walls. I needed to try my luck on this one. I would literally give anything for
it. Even now. Having some paintings in the non-frequented museum last December
actually has gone away with something to do with an eighth of that appetite,
but it is still there. (I recently acquired back the paintings, two photos
faded and one is missing. They have been locked for months in a certain hall in
the museum while all along I have been seeing them, in my dreams, hanging on
the walls of some individual who bought them.)
The gallery attendant whom I selfishly
consulted and preserved the business card she had given to me looked honest and
a great companion of a young artist still in the shadows of a lime light. The
way I felt she had encouraged me and how she had clearly stated their mission
in revolutionizing the Kisumu art scene was amazing. Charming to praise it. And
I could not help but see myself in the train. That is a mistake I always make
as an artist, seeing myself already accomplished. But it could not be a mistake
in some other times.
And that day I found someone at the
gallery’s desk. He was doing whatever people do with their laptops, seeming to
press the largest key on the keyboard. A soft background music, RnB, soft rock…
whatever was aloft. There was this cold atmosphere despite the scorching
lake-level sun outside the mall. At that time I could not throw a glance either
to my left or right side. I felt the monotony ruled; same paintings, same
sculptures, same artifacts. And I was there to break that same everything.
My brain had already envisioned how it
would be like talking to her, Leah was her name. She was my sister’s namesake
and hence the method of approach to her was like that I apply to my sister. No
huge barriers of communication, an occasional prank, a compliment. No flirting.
So I had my homework done, and a clear plain page for the day’s class-work.
She wasn’t there. I could not believe
she wasn’t. Her shawl tucked on the back-rest of her chair gave some hope. Only
I could not wait for her to come. Besides, her boss was there. That boss she
had tentatively booked some appointment for me but I had intentionally failed
to show up just to see the reaction. I was confronting him about his employee
and he simply said that they work together and that I should go ahead “Let’s
see what you got.”
He was the curator, a title I have come
across so often being claimed by the white of the races. I could not believe I
had met so casually with a curator!
Diang’a had told me something about
those guys who opened a gallery, sorted and seek for works of art from the
artists in town and within no time after the gallery fills to the brim,
disappear with not a single trace. This one didn’t look like one of the bad
guys.
After taking my lecturer’s phone number,
and writing it in some book with everything scribbled (it must have been his
diary) the discourse began. He had seen the unfinished paintings. The two
canvases I had rolled and tucked together for easy transport whereas the boards
were not framed. He mentioned something about my work being more appealing on
board than they were on canvas, a comment that really caught me off the hook
and to which I gave a cold chuckle. ‘They are different surfaces what do you
expect’ sort of thing.
And then came his main argument. My age.
He clearly outlined his boundaries, “Unless you are a high-selling artist and
is being exhibited as far as Mombasa, I cannot buy you.” He had swallowed all
those words and I presume he wished I had not heard his sadism. He had to cover
it up by explaining himself more.
For a moment I thought he was judging me
on the basis of my academia, a thought he refuted and basically cleared his
stands on who is a good artist: ‘One who has mastered his technique and from
which now is experimenting on other ways and media.’ That I was still young and
I was in an exploitative stage, one of discovery that involved everything on my
way being tried out in my studio, he felt that I was still unstable.
Worst of all (and the plain truth) he
said he would be lying to exhibit me alongside some other artist who has been
in the industry for long and has of course cut himself a niche. This artist
could be exhibiting some abstract pieces that I think I can as well make but
his portfolio show some of his abilities and command which I am not even ten
miles close at reaching.
There was that dare. In one week I was
to draw some five portraits in pencil and they were supposed to be better than
those exhibited. I took my stand on taking it but let me face it, the big
lesson was written on the board.
We must have argued up to close an hour
when he mentioned something about having some other better things to do. I did
not want to just leave like that so I had to ‘stick around grab some book or
two’. He stretched his graceful arm in an affirmatory gesture. I wish he had
the same hands open for my hopeless pieces. I left them just beneath the counter
in a black paper bag. Now and then a swirling wind would come from that
direction in which the cinema was located. It would blow the paper bag which
would in turn struggle to remain stuck onto the counter, conservative of its
contents not knowing that an eye standing as far away as where the entrance was
could wonder what such a disturbing piece of paper was doing in a place of
affluence.
“These ones belong to him,” I heard him
tell Leah. She had finally come and I had shortly before responded to her
soothing ‘good-morning’. It should and could not have been a morning. I just
could not let go of my handkerchief, wiping every bit of sweat that was
excreted in streams, ironical of the previously domination of a cold
atmosphere. I blamed the fluorescent tube that lit just above me but the air
conditioner took the blame voluntarily. It should have known its work and be
faithful to the end!
I wanted to sit on the sparkling white
tiles on the floor like I had previously done when I first visited this gallery
and ‘I had never spent more time in a gallery before’ was my comment on the
visitors’ book. Now I didn’t know what use the gallery could be to me, now that
they won’t exhibit my works. I must have touched all the books in their shallow
art library despite the disgusting ‘Do not touch’ sign at the entrance. How
many hands can a normal human being use to touch? That sign had nothing short
of five hands. That disgusting. To show how disgusting it is to touch paintings
and sculptures of some ‘great’ artists. But I had touched most of the things
there in my learning expeditions. I wanted to feel how opaque colors feel, to
see the wash and feel it too and I also wanted to feel the touch of aluminum
foil weft into what was called a Swahili kanzu and priced at sh.140 000.
He had murmured some words that were
inaudible to Leah. Of course I heard the words. And when Leah pardoned him, he
simply responded in one word which was ‘gharama’- cost. My brain had to
struggle in figuring out the cash flow in a curator’s world. Go around sniffing
for ‘marketable’ pieces of work, having a collection and setting them on
display selling to a willing buyer. The affluent definitely. No wonder I don’t
see a gallery in my village or in my hometown.
Lunch time set him off and I followed
close behind. Leah was concerned about the fate of my works. I told her he said
my case was different because I had my own technique. (I didn’t mention
‘experimenting’) “And stuff…” I concluded hoping she understood.
“Ok. He is the owner of the gallery,”
she said, to mean whatever happened she could do nothing in her power. I must
have told her that it was alright I would be stopping by and when I was walking
downstairs watching the fountain on my left, I started doubting the life in
art. She had told me that they are the ones who did the mega monumental relief
in the mall, one showing the normal every-day life of the people on the lake
shores, some fishing in a dhow others with nets.
There was an elephant bronze sculpture
on the way to the supermarket. I guess it was something about their logo.
Corporate image. What most people didn’t know- and I didn’t know till Leah told
me is that the creator of all those works had recently passed on. That
knowledge, unconsciously in my subconscious mind elevated my liking of his
works. You look at them and see him alive.
I thought I would hop into the
supermarket, run to the books stall and see some blurbs here and there but I
had some paintings under my left armpit and I didn’t want to leave them at the
luggage counter so I went away.
Nothing of that story, the encounter
with the curator, I passed on to Diang’a, my old man. He had said it was just
okay to give the gallery guys ‘two or three’ paintings but I had all seven on
by back, to and fro. And that ordeal would be best preserved in my memory books
or, as I did, shared with my fellow classmates. While they had never built a
capacity to fill the need of exhibition their support was handy since some
mentioned me as their ‘hope’ considering I had tentatively came up with my own
technique. And they loved it.
***
Diang’a tells me that as per the times
we live, there happen to have a horde that claim the title of being artists and
us being many, a contrast to their times when the artists were sparsely
populated, we are better placed and privileged. That unity should be a purpose
and marginalization a goal. But still there is this individuality coupled with
superiority-complex that always engulfs itself in the heart of every living
artist. Everyone for their own and God for us all.
In their time things were no good. While
exposure was opportunistic, one never missed the knife of the jealous
colleagues or worse still the tutors. Some lecturers could not for example
stand as boss in a class where one of the students was exhibiting in a major
solo exhibition in town- it could be in Paa ya Paa Gallery or Gallery Africa.
And that student be the young Obaso. This really posed a threat to some of
these lecturers who were a product of the West and were themselves hauling in a
battle ensued by the hostility from their counterparts the self-taught artists.
These two groups saw the art world in two different scopes. While one was
indulging in some art-making which they called abstract the other showed a
skill in the way nature was put, to his canvas. Maybe one of them was right.
One had to be right.
Kihumbu Thairu drew a parallel in his
book The African Traditions of a Western piece of art work (abstract- some old
tins and cans assemblage) in comparison to a Makonde artist’s skillfully carved
piece of the African blackwood, which was referred to as a curio. His argument
was that the Makonde piece is by every means better than the assemblage and
that again contradicts my mind as a young artist in Africa.
Of the what-is-what in the art scene in
the 70s, such names as Jak Katarikawe and Wanyu Brush spearhead the self-taught
herd while Kang’ara wa Njambi and Kahare Miano and Diang’a show of the academia. A close
scrutiny of the two suggests clearly the superiority of academia in terms of
variety and basic training. The former group is found lacking in exposure to a
variety of ventures, one often leaning on one side say painting while his
counterpart might be practicing in more than one art genre. But whether an
artist must express themselves in an abstract way or not is still in a debate
buried and hidden in the hearts and minds of many Africans. Its like well,
Jackson Pollock was in abstraction and he sells highly, Pablo was of cubism,
the primitivism Jean-Michel and our very own Mutu Wangeci.
Most of us students and young artists
have a heavier list of artists from the West as compared to that of our own
continent and individual countries, whom we live with and breathe the same air,
in the Land of the Sun. Maybe it is because most of our academic syllabus especially
in the university is focused on the Western art.
“It is inevitable. We clearly cannot
escape from the Western influence,” Diang’a told me once. “But then it is a
matter of choice. You say this is what the education is offering, but this is
what I have chosen.”
To live and interact with the normal
people around us. To draw parallels from them and let them inspire us. Being a
voice and acting a god- creating figures that clearly spell out life as it is.
and not just any life but the very life we live is what Diang’a embarked on
even long before his resignation as a college lecturer in ().
“I decided to go big,,” he says,
referring to his monumental sculptures some which never cease to amaze me.
“They are all for posterity.”
Given the modern trends in say networking
and communication it is clear that such societal misdeeds such as racism,
tribalism occupy a place in the outside and what we are facing is what I would
call a revolutionized society, one with only one vital outstanding aspect-
information. Information is powerful and information distinguishes a functional
personality from a dormant one. Information tells us what we need and where to
get it from. It clearly outlines what is bad and the reason why it is so.
Simply put it is what we are.
We don’t want to go around shouting that
we are Africans so that everybody knows we are. The Asians need not do that
either. Everybody who has access to information knows exactly what life in
Asia, Africa, America and other parts of the world including in the space is
like. Everyone who has access to information does not have to struggle with
“how to…” questions. Life is made easier with information. Life is less costly
with information. And one can only understand and therefore love life more if
one knows life- information.
So if I am supposed to live nothing
short of an informed young African artist, one can only imagine what the future
has in store for me or lacks in store for me.
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| One of the latest projects Diang'a and I have worked on in his studio at Pungulu Pangala Culinary Art Center |
Weighing the Options
One day Diang’a told me, “Artists are the
worst scavengers you’ll ever find.” It was at a time we were just about to have
lunch after doing some activities in a garden(mentioned in earlier chapters) he
has been working on for six years now, with fishponds claiming a remarkable
portion of its land.
I had not given much thought to that
statement and then he mentioned that for an artist, the only worry is whether
you are relevant. “As long as you have some sukuma wiki on the table, you are
good.”
He highlighted that sometimes creativity
disappears to heaven knows where and at that time, ‘You can’t produce
anything.” And hence one should be aware of and take the advantage of the time
when one is bubbling with creativity.
The statement of being the worst
scavengers has never really fully dawned on me. Perhaps I might want to run him
into some reflection episode to awaken what he had in mind then. But he did
mention, at that time, something about him being a farmer. Just yesterday I had
this anomalous thought of him being recognized as one of the greatest artists
in Kenya, but few will know him as a farmer- in fishing nets selling tilapia
and clarius or in the turkey business.
And there comes the secret. An artist
who is also somebody else. One of my friends told me that it is very difficult
to make it out there as an artist. Why? Her argument- everyone is painting,
everyone is sculpting. I gave that a lame comment; artists are just lazy. It
was only lame to her but to me, it meant that if one does something that
everyone else is doing then that person is lacking in creativity or is lazy to
say the least. I thought that you could be a painter but one separated from the
crowd.
She went ahead to say that unless one is
doing something else that is ploughing in some income, art alone is weak as a
sole income earner. Now there comes scavenging.
Commercial art is a whole different
topic and is itself separated from academic art and the third type- art for
art’s sake. I guess I have been in art for art sake for a long time and all
along thinking I can make money out of it. I do art for its own sake and I am
at logger heads with my lecturers since they want realism. One day with a
camera I made five hundred and thirty eight photos, that were taken at secluded
places in the Kima hills, a place I nicknamed the world of the white granite and
in one second someone erased all those photos ‘unknowingly’ from my phone
memory. That is how delicate I am as an artist.
In the last notes of the late Prof.
Francis Imbuga, one of the best playwrights East Africa has ever had, we see
his scope of an artist. And the fate of the art the artist makes. He says in
the last line, “I want my art to be universal, strongly appealing and permanent
to the future hazards of interpretations on its own, for that is what it will
always be, art, minus me.”
I have so far in my life met with people
who strongly think that I can do something else other than art as a course. One
of them was a class of pupils in a local academy whom I was teaching Math.
Quite a number of them thought that I should do Math and be a Mathematician.
Quite a long title for a simple useless human being. I have, young as I am
weighed my options and something deep inside me glistens at the thought of I
being an artist and the few years I have grown in this exciting world.
Let’s face it, if I become a Mathematician
I may want also to be a Medical Doctor or a Pilot or a Lawyer and clearly I may
not become any of them. But as an artist I will need, at some point in my life
when it is necessary, to become a doctor on order to talk to the doctor and the
audience as well. It may be on the stage or in a book or in a painting-
bottom-line I have acted the doctor- now I will act the mathematician, the
accountant, the actuary, the economist, the judge, the president, name them.
It is all in black and white; art is
life itself. And if I ever want to be remembered in life after I am long gone,
let it be that I lived- not my own selfish life with a huge salary in the bank-
but I lived life- I lived to make others smile or be lost in emotions when they
saw my Mona Lisa painting- lived many other people’s lives in order to share
their plight and set free their chains. I lived to live.
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| Artist John Diang'a at work repairing an outdoor cement sculpture at his home compound. |
Command and Legacy
“This place will soon take its shape,” he tells me after a six month
holiday on my side. It has been a long one so he insists that I ‘go around and
see what has been happening.’ Unknown to him, my eye is a bit reluctant this
time round. The inner eye has claimed a larger portion of the seeing business
and it not refuting the serenity that does not escape the physical eye, there
is something embedded o`n the inside that is responsible for an emotion never
experienced before in this particular environment.
My inner self wishes to talk to the
casuarinas that have graced and continue to grace this place some with their
whistling others with their green elegance and all with their wonderful
modified branches. The weaver birds still have the same old songs in their beak
tips even though they must have hatched and the lot I now see is a new one, the
young ones of the current generation. The song is never distinguishable as that
of an older generation or a new one. The drained pond in front of me suggests
an end of a pond cycle; time is still counting.
I notice some emptiness prevalent of the
litter bins, some with cobwebs and there and then I think of abandonment. The
deciduous of the tree species have done their job so there are dry leaves lying
haphazardly on the grassy ground that was formerly a green haven. “We have not
had an onset for a long period.” And when I once again give a closer
scrutinizing look at the whole place, even the wind thereof, I all at once feel
the gravity of the life in it.
“It still has its beauty,” I think. Only
something in me is questioning the reality of art; what an artist have in
command of art. The tortoises are still in their pen and I notice the young
ones completely immersed in their little basin water. “Do they ever grow?” I
ask myself but I cannot escape the fact that theirs is a slow life. I mean my
hair must have grown an inch or two taller than it was when I was here, I don’t
seem to see any change in the tortoise. The hyacinth is still their favorite
solo meal and their shell the only luggage they are carrying.
I wish they could talk to me too, I need
answers!
I saw him in the morning, one of my
mentors or rather my other former mentor. The stare must have been a static one
only it did last for a mere second, something I could not expect after a whole
year of ‘loss’. His specks which he earned after his torturous venture in
electronic fabrication as a young adventurous artist still have an image
dominance to his whole and his stature still does not lie. His greeting would
be described as heavy, warm and heavy and his eye, without doubt, still see the
good things in life: there are some paintings apparently hanging on the walls
of the departmental office and he seems not to get enough of them. He mentions
being in a rush and therefore be given what concerns him but to-whom he is
telling is reluctant and she is furious with him, a reaction that I soon learn
it is out of a lack. Details away, I take silent steps away from that place
when another worker comes in, seems she has been in a nap and has been awaked
by the voice dominance of this old-time colleague.
While I was walking away I was asking myself a
question that could never lack in a young artist’s mind when they met there
mentor right in their eyes and simply could not make it to have a word with
them: why is he here? What do I tell him when I meet him again? What does he
think of me?
But I could feel another force from deep
inside pressing me to answer the question of him being an artist and what his
art has been doing to him and his existence under the sun.
“Me I believe in giving,” he told me in
the course of the day. Diang’a said he cannot, unlike his other colleagues of
his kind be mean with information, what he referred to as ‘the little one has’,
only to remain relevant. Fear has it that most artists in the industry don’t
share their art experience with others and especially the young lot only so as
to preserve their dominance. It is a monopoly case. “Yeah,” he told me, “and
you know you realize that when you share it is when you gain more because you
will learn more. You will think of other ways to improve.”
When I hopped in to his gallery I
realized I was forcing myself to talk to myself amidst darkness. The yearning,
the questions, all these emotions in me demanded an explosion. I looked at
every piece in the Esiepalla cultural center, a place Diang’a started way back
in 1982 and as he tells me every now and then, was a bee-hive of activities. An
article mentioning the center is an archival document in a certain newspaper
media house and is seen to me in the gallery extension at the garden he calls
Pungulu Pangala, a name that suggests drama. “Where everything just falls here
and there,” he says.
Sometime back I had myself in an
analytical research trying to document, though only in my small head, what
could be simply termed as the artist’s lifetime inspiration. And now in that
gallery I felt the reptilic figuration dominance from art prints to the very
small soapstone piece. And there is something more, curvature. Everything has
some kind of a movement; a motion that carries you I don’t know. Pisces theme
is definitely in the equation while one never escapes the powerful expression
of human emotions on the clay pieces.
Then I realized that actually what I had
seen presented in that high-level craft and skill was really just a shadow of
the kind of nature the same man has created in what he calls ‘an extension’ of
what we have in the gallery. It heavily dawns on me, though vaguely that there
is a hint of a whole and a fully spent life. The last time he touched the
soapstone file must have been in the 90’s, and that also carried clay with it.
While the garden project begun in 1996 with mango trees planting and excavation
of the largest fishpond in the one-acre plot of land, the work that resulted to
its today’s elegance didn’t start until 2006.
Now I know its significance and its
royal place in the whole picture. “Now I just want to embark myself into
writing,” he says to me once in a while. Only I don’t know why it has to be
that he writes while in this new place he has created of late. To him it is
dusk and he wants an account of his life as an artist. That is just my thought.
While in the gallery yesterday I tried
to get the whole meaning of art. Yes I tried but I realized that in my mind I
couldn’t grasp it all. The lecturer must have given me a theoretical
explanation which is now out in the wind, and even if I still had it in mind,
could not be of any help to me because it did mention something about aesthetics,
something I am not seeking as per now. I want a more solid explanation. I want
art itself.
I want to look at a soapstone piece and
at the same time see its maker and read his thoughts in what may seem as a
telepathic way only to try and understand his take on what he was creating,
only all that will account for a half of the knowledge required to fully
understand that art piece. The real meaning is only realized when we fully
understand the art piece only by its own standards, itself.
It goes without saying that for one in
this field to reach the peak of command one has to have had a trail of long
practice in the same field and as a young artist, the best time to practice is
in the dawn of your career. There is that stage where you don’t need to sell
though we really need to sell on the contrary. Get your pencil or brush into
practice and don’t expect anything of monetary value out of it, only
compliments here and encouragement there and of course criticism everywhere,
which must and should be taken positively otherwise no growth shall be
realized. When the next stage arrives, you will know it.
In the same gallery I see wonderful art
pieces that unexpectedly have varied signatures. “They are all over.” Diang’a
tells me referring to the owners of those works. He had met some of them in
college as their tutor, others were his apprentices (like I am now) and others
were teachers. Once he looked at a clay piece and told me a story about the
person, even the latest update!
It came to me that art has of different
importance to different peoples and after all, its place is that purpose of
talking. A look at the gallery can mean that Diang’a gives endless stories and
accounts which I never knew and some which I can never apprehend while I myself
on my part could also give another different story of my experience. I have had
different people to the gallery with me and each, without saying, has had a
very obviously different reaction from the others. Amusement being a common
denominator, the story thereof is varied.
Along the way, on this exciting, journey
one meets a horde with all there differences. And sometimes circumstantial
conditions have had me having to see people as themselves articles of creation
that could be simply brought down to art pieces. They, and every other particle
in the universe whether living or non-living, have that same classification in
my books. I have people claiming that the way our universe is set one doesn’t
repel from the conclusion of a supreme being somewhere to whom all credit
belongs. I don’t refuse that too though in the back of my mind there a hint of
‘jealousy’ and that feeling of having a master, a unique one to whom everything
I owe.
If by human exploration and increasing
knowledge of the universe: all the details of the space and the information
thereof, the universe is beginning as they say, ‘to know itself’ then by doing
what seems as what lay the foundations of the universe itself then we act the
universe.
I overheard a college student ask
Diang’a whether he has executed sculptures in what he called fourth dimension,
a question to which he hesitated and consequently, while stammering said that
we should leave the fourth dimension to the science guys, having emphatically
sighted that in visual arts we have up to the third dimension. One can’t say
more on that.
And now I say as long as I am on planet
Earth, my paint shall always show that heavy downward pull of gravity; in which
case is viscosity. “Everything just drops here and there,” that is his
explanation of Pungulu Pangala.
