Renaissance reborn

This, the most loosely painted of all the works on show, gave off a sense of heat and the dry tang of vegetation.

Oddly enough in the smaller higher key, paintings that start the show (each around 14cm by 18cm) the artist’s obsession with detail appears almost finicky.

Because the scenes are slight — a tree, a hut, a field — one becomes more interested in the How than the What.

They are charming but somewhat stiff and artificial compared with the larger paintings, in which that same attention to detail is subsumed, quite literally, by the bigger picture — it becomes subservient to the whole.

Far from home, Wekesa learnt her craft in Italy almost by accident.

She had made friends with some Italians while a pupil at the cosmopolitan Hillcrest School in Nairobi and that was enough to tip her towards the art conservatories of Rome, Florence and Milan.

It is not a decision she regrets.

As well as being exposed at first hand to some of the world’s finest art, and the architectural glories of the European Renaissance, she also enjoyed some of the country’s superb food.

“We had a Sicilian cook and I loved her pastas and soups. Sicilian cooking is richer and they use more oil in their cooking than in the north,” she told me.

But even while tucking in to these hearty meals, Wekesa did not forget she was an African woman.

On the contrary, a part of her studies focused on the history, development and styles of tribal art.

Indeed, for one corporate client, Coca Cola, she organised the purchase and documentation of more than 180 paintings and sculptures, including tribal pieces.

In Italy she learnt about mural painting, with some fine examples to hand – the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo in Rome, and Leonardo’s Last Supper in a convent in Milan — to name but two.

It is as a muralist that Wekesa first became known.

Two notable commissions included a boardroom wall at the Coca Cola Africa headquarters, in the UK, where she painted sand dunes, and the ranch house of the Wildensteins in Nanyuki.