An obsession writ large

You've seen the pictures, you’ve read the reviews … now you can read the whole story by the man himself.

Artist Richard Onyango is telling his life story (for the umpteenth time, actually, but more of that in a minute) in a new book titled, revealingly enough, The Life and Times of Richard Onyango.

And in case you miss the point, on the cover is one of the series of paintings that brought fame and fortune to this slender ex-drummer from the little known Bahari Boys Jazz Band.
It is, of course, of the gigantic Dr Suzy Drossie, femme fatale and femme enorme.

She sits wobbling on the edge of a bed, which appears perilously close to collapse beneath her weight, one arm placed tenderly on the shoulder of Our Hero, the artist himself. It must have been like having a walrus slap a flipper on your back.

The core of the book is really about Onyango’s infatuation with Drossie and the astonishing series of paintings that documented their life together.

These pictures, almost as huge as the woman herself, proved so popular that they gave Onyango an international reputation and made him the darling of dealers and buyers alike.

His show at the old RaMoMA in Nairobi’s Rahimtulla Tower in February 2003, for example, was said to have attracted the biggest crowd ever to visit a Kenyan exhibition.

It is true that the woman was monumentally obese, it is true that many of the pictures were patently raunchy.

But it is also undeniable that the paintings were good: Honest, straightforward, well composed, colourful and realistic enough to support their underpinning of a genuinely moving story.

For Suzy Drossie, after capturing the artist’s heart and drawing him into her world of Mercedes, cruises and luxury bath salts, suffered a heart attack and died, leaving him distraught, bereft and with only his memories of their love to fall back on.

But Onyango is not only about Suzy Drossie.

Born in Kisii and moving to Tana River as a child, he became fascinated by all forms of transport and — to my eye at least — his paintings of lorries, buses, Land Rovers and planes are easily equal in quality to his Drossie pictures.

But, let’s face it, Drossie is the story that supports his popularity and it is for the endless, hypnotic pictures of her and of them together that he is known.

Psychologists and social scientists could probably have a field day with this story of a poor black man falling hopelessly for a predatory white woman.

It’s only one well documented example of a fairly common Coastal experience (as is the occurrence of rich white men meeting poor black girls, although I have heard it argued that it is never entirely clear until the end of the day exactly which one is the predator) and no doubt thesis are yet to be written on the subject.