Renaissance reborn

If you look carefully at the background of any portrait by a Renaissance master — Leonardo, say, or Bellini — you will see set out in perfect order rows of trees, fields, haystacks, maybe a cliff and a church or two.

Often a river wanders off towards a haze of mountains, or a stream tumbles down a ravine.

These scenes of bucolic bliss were usually painted not by the master himself but by his studio assistants or promising pupils.

Although subsidiary to the subject they were rendered in perfect detail; immaculate, with every stone seen, every leaf in place and the light dancing off the water.

Seeing them is key to understanding the work of one of Kenya’s leading wildlife and landscape painters, Camille Wekesa.

For Wekesa learned her craft in Italy, where she was exposed each day to some of the world’s greatest works of art.

And it is this exposure that she rates as the single greatest influence on her work.

It can be seen in the meticulous detail of her canvases, whether small or huge — some 15 of which were exhibited recently at the RaMoMA, in Nairobi.

Very popular they proved to be, too, with all the big canvases sold — at some Ksh250,000 ($3,290)each — and a substantial number of the smaller works finding new homes.

Bizarrely, what was for me the finest picture in the show has yet to meet a buyer.

Called Blue Mountains, it showed a river meandering into the distance, where slept the range of mountains that gave the painting its title.

But what was remarkable about it — what stopped me in front of the canvas — was the masterly handling of the foreground … a stretch of sandy rock which led down to the water and became the river bed.

It was so tactile I could have walked into the painting and felt the sand scuff beneath my feet and the heat bouncing back off the rock — an astonishing technical coup.

And Wekesa is very good at getting the feel of a place.

In another picture, Tsavo River Light, huge palms line the broad waters.

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.

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.

I thought of The Scapegoat by Holman Hunt, trembling knock-kneed in its parched desert, and the astonishing overhead light that gives such vertiginous energy to Manfred on the Jungfrau, by Ford Madox Brown, father of the Brotherhood.

It was only when I discovered Wekesa’s Italian connection that her true influences became clear to me. And of course, in one sense the backgrounds of Renaissance portraits are stage sets before which the central figure makes its bow.

An encouraging thing about Wekesa’s exhibition — apart from its sustained quality — was that many of the paintings were sold to Kenyans and not only to the expat buyers who are presumed to dominate the market.

The English Impressionist Walter Sickert once noted drily, “An Englishman likes a tune he can whistle,” which, it would seem, is true of Kenyans too.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email: fwhalley@gmail.com