Picture perfect
From poverty to plenty, Kenyan-born artist has exhibited around world
GUIDED BY INSTINCT: Kenyan-born artist Wakaba Mutheki with some of his portraits at the top end of the William Moffett Expressway. Mutheki, 47, who has exhibited in the US and Europe, says his style is guided by instinct.
Nelson Mandela Bay fine art fans have received a surprise visit from top Kenyan-born artist Wakaba Mutheki, who has launched an impromptu sale of some of his works on the side of the road at the top end of William Moffett Expressway opposite Builders Warehouse.
Mutheki, 47, who has exhibited in the US and Europe, said yesterday his style was guided by instinct.
“I never had an art teacher. Whatever I am interested in — I just go in without thinking.
“My work has always been different because I never studied and tried to emulate any other artist.
“Every day I practise and produce sometimes five paintings a day.
“I work for six months of the year but I really push it.
“Then I market for the next six.
“I enjoy what I do. Everything else is a bonus.”
He said he started painting when he was eight years old, and had done so through primary and high school in Nairobi.
Then, when he was 17, he and a group of friends headed south in search of a new life, travelling on the back of trucks and cadging lifts until they were in SA.
Life had not been easy, especially in the beginning, he recalled.
“At one stage I was surviving through the sale of empty Coke bottles.
“I experienced the harsher side of things.
“These experiences have taught me to treasure life and have inspired me to recreate this love of life through the medium of art.”
While he was in a refugee centre in Cape Town he made his first few sales to galleries.
One of these galleries snapped him up and he worked for them for a decade, gradually establishing himself in the fine art mainstream.
Today, dubbed “the African Van Gogh”, Mutheki works mostly in acrylic but sometimes in oils, with his style ranging from modern contemporary to ultra realism, focused on “whatever comes to mind — portraits, street scenes, landscapes, Nguni cattle, I do them all”.
He has hosted sell-out exhibitions at galleries in New York and Philadelphia, and has been invited to exhibit in various centres around the world including in India and at the UN in Geneva.
He has been commissioned by SAB, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Gallo Records, Liberty and the Chief Albert Luthuli Museum, among others.
He said his family lived in Johannesburg and his younger daughter, Tiffany, 8, had revealed a definite artistic talent.
“I teach her all I know and she is probably going to be better than me.”
Based at a studio in Johannesburg, he had come down to Port Elizabeth to visit friends and clients, and had not planned to sell any artworks, he said.
“But then I saw this spot and inquired if it would be possible and it was so I thought I would try.
“It’s going very well and I will probably be here until the end of the month.”