The Young African Artist's Fate: A Comprehensive Study of Obaso Diang'a the Artist

The Artist's Fate

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

A side view of the entrance to Dianga's Esiepala Cultural Center (1982)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the many soapstone pieces by John Diang'a. This one 'Entanglement' is on display at Kunst Transit Gallery Berlin Germany

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.

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.

Artist John Diang'a at work repairing an outdoor cement sculpture at his home compound.

Command and Legacy

I wish in my sobriety

I would be many things

But one at a time

Only then can I reach

A climax at any

  “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.     

John Diang'a stands next to one of his latest giant sculptures (done 12th December, 2013) at Pungulu Pangala Culinary Art Center