Renaissance reborn

For them she has painted the walls of six entire rooms.

Noted collectors, the Wildensteins own art galleries in New York and California plus an institute in Paris that specialises in the Impressionists.

Of late, Wekesa has returned to her home and studio in a pleasantly relaxed part of Nairobi to concentrate on easel painting and, in particular, on the landscapes that made up her latest exhibition.

They were painted following safaris to the desolate Shaba national reserve, to the farmlands of her home in Western Kenya and then to Tsavo East with its dry bushland and lush vegetation along the river banks.

Her own favourite painting from the show has personal memories for her.

Called Farm Life, it is of her family’s land in Kitale, a doum palm in the foreground as detailed as anything on show.

Each leaf has been painted with meticulous concern for colour, light and form and, like the tree itself, becomes alive to the viewer — as in life, greater than the sum of its individual, meticulous parts.

Hanging next to it was a large landscape called Thorn Tree Delight.

It was of an avenue of acacias, again each leaf painted with care.

The path between the trees, however, was rather less successful.

It had a rubbery quality that gave it an unexpected artificiality.

In some ways it resembled a mural, or maybe scenery for a play.

Partly because of this it most presented, of all the pictures on show, what admirers often feel is a surrealist quality to her work.

Like the other pictures it is minutely detailed but more importantly to that thesis is the unrelenting harshness of the light… it is as though the trees were a stage set waiting for the actors to emerge, but already bathed in the intense white theatre lights.

Actually, rather than the Surrealists, Wekesa’s work reminded me of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that self indulgent group of eccentrics who nonetheless produced great paintings by looking back before Raphael, to the masters of Quattrocento Italian art.