Betty Caplan
17 August 2008
RICHARD ONYANGO WAS not born a painter -- first he had to serve an apprenticeship as sign-painter, bus driver, woodcarver, carpenter, fashion designer, farmer and furniture maker before he was allowed to do the work he was destined for: art.
This chequered career has not been a disadvantage. The art he has produced is realistic, hard-nosed, yet full of the illusions of a man born into a humble family in Western province who has found himself, to his surprise, the most internationally successful Kenyan artist.
Several of his works will be on display in a group show opening in Lamu on August 18.
In 1992, Onyango published a book called The Salambo Night, which gives many clues to the enigmatic artist whose reputation is largely based on his short but intense relationship with a large white woman called Drosie.
It isn't just the images but the way the book is written that tells us so much about the artist and his lasting muse and inspiration.
But it also describes his extraordinary life -- which, like that of so many artists in Kenya, was forged without the benefit of educational or institutional support.
At first, he was "discovered" by a local Italian, Sarenco, since then he has been launched on the international scene in a way no other Kenyan artist has done to date.
Since 1998, he has had solo exhibitions in Milan, Geneva, Messina, New York and Malindi, where he lives, as well as taking part in group exhibitions in Monaco, Houston, Tokyo, London and Dusseldorf. But none of this has gone to his head and he remains as straightforward and engaging as ever.
Fortunately, the book has been published just as he wrote it, without the wild idiosyncrasies ironed out of it. The spelling and punctuation errors, the capital letters used to express extreme emotion, all work to give you a real flavour of the man and lure you into the story.
He met Drosie at Nyali Beach Hotel and she hit him like a thunderbolt; in fact, the French have a word to describe it -- un coup de foudre. His description of his first impression of her is very visual, the words of an artist (he was at the time playing in a band called The Bahari Boys).
"So as I was beating my drum-set plates, my eyes cought (sic) a Big Fat-thick blonde lady leaving her seat coming to move near my drum set.
SHE WAS WEARING A CREAM dress which looked very expensive like linen-velvet. She looked at me as she passed near my drum set in front of me to somewhere... I changed the beats as she passed and she gave me a broad smile. I accepted and responded to her smile with a smile too.
She was a big fat brawny lady with large eyes which had brown pupils and painted almost naturally with black top eyelids. Her hair was covered with a red shining scarf." When they finally exchange words, he is overcome:
"Oh how are you madam? Good evening please I greated [sic] her with high respect. Fine thanks, she replied. Oh, please welcome. I am sorry I didn't know its you my dear please forgive me EH!!! Well, they call me Richard. I stopped almost abruptly with heavy breath as if I was being chased by a lion. Mine is Drosie, she replied."
The exaggeration is echoed in the art: he has several premonitions that she is going to be taken away from him prematurely and one image has a relatively saintly looking Drosie being carried off from hellish earth to a serene place above.
As happens so often, the artist features in the picture as a small insignificant figure gripping his armchair in one corner as if he is frozen to the seat. The large rocky shapes that dominate the work give some inkling of what he is suffering.
THE ACCOUNT OF THEIR REL-ationship helps greatly in understanding the paintings; she has always been famous for her size (which probably killed her shortly afterwards in a sudden heart attack) but Onyango exaggerates her girth partly because the style of his art borders on pop and surrealism and partly because she is psychologically overwhelming for him, a young man of 20 at the time who has never had any relations with women, coming from a strict Luo Christian home.
When I ask him about falling in love with her, he hesitates slightly.
"I was a young man still at school. I knew nothing about ladies and my mother warned me to keep away from them."
Drosie is seven years older than him, but still seems attached to her parents, who accompany her to Mombasa. Eventually, her father flatly refuses to allow her to marry a "beach boy," which he assumes Onyango is because he is black and doesn't have a respectable profession.
Drosie showers him with expensive gifts which he cannot repay but he is loving and faithful, apart from the terrible Salambo night when he lies to her and goes to play in the band instead of visiting relatives.
With a woman's instinct for the truth, she sniffs him out and finds him surrounded by young women. She is now fully in her stride as a lion. She drags him off by the scruff of the neck and pushes him into the car.
"It was her habit that when she struggles, she does not yell or speak anything, she only uses her eyes to demand or command but not her mouth...."
A whole section of the book is devoted to this illuminating incident -- "The Salambo Night," with poor Onyango hopelessly defeated by the sheer strength and determination of this virago.
Carried away by images of an America that barely exists except in Onyango's imagination, it all takes place against a backdrop of a super-clean, modern Mombasa, which you would not recognise, and the final image shows the meek artist stuck in the back seat as the forlorn lady drives him home in her Mercedes Benz.
For the rest, it is clear that they had a good life together, and that it was not the commonly trotted out stereotype of, "She's just in it for the sex and he's in it for the money."
A beaming Drosie is portrayed charitably feeding the poor and the needy during Christmas and enjoying safaris in game parks with her beau Richard and exercising in the sitting room.
It seems they shared a fantasy world, their presence together enough to satisfy them. A rapturous painting of the couple on a motor cycle on a perfect road surrounded by building machinery underneath an overpass carrying a train cannot have been done in Kenya!
This smacks of Hollywood, and that exhilarating sense that you can go places just by virtue of being in that vast American landscape.
Of course they were not intellectual equals, but must everyone discuss election fiascos over breakfast? His feelings for her are clearly genuine, and his grief as she lays dying in Pandya Hospital palpable.
For him, she seems to have played the roles of Madonna and Whore in a highly theatrical fashion that the art clearly celebrates.
In a way, their liaison is a kind of an allegory of the relationship between the First and Third Worlds, though willingly entered into rather than based on exploitation.
VEHICLES OF ALL KINDS DO- minate Onyango's landscape -- when he was a child, the bus which came once every day or two was like manna from heaven.
"It was the only way of getting to Malindi, the New World!" he exclaims. "It brought bread, grandmothers, uncles -- everything came on the bus."
Later, after he had completed some fine paintings of the Tana River bus, the company paid for his schooling and so he felt forever indebted to it. In their relationship, Drosie's Merc played a large part, transporting him from his humble bandplaying to the life of a spoiled kept man.
But throughout his life, cars, trucks and buses have been instrumental -- he worked as a bus driver and inspector in his early years, and gleaming examples shine out of this book. Lovingly painted, they show a professional's passion for engines, the Leyland truck all white and polished, even its wheelplates scrubbed.
Others are more familiar to Kenyans: a pair of handsome secretary birds watch an overloaded Tana River Bus bound for Garissa drive through a barren landscape with only one acacia tree remaining to relieve the bleakness.
But bleak is not a word to describe Onyango: In person, just as in his art, he is full of vigor and optimism, carried along by his faith in God, his art and his immense good luck. His laughter echoes everywhere, even through the finally tragic story of his one great love affair.
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