Art student Joseph Makau arranges his subjects on dark backdrops to highlight happy times.

His painting Euphoria shows the multicoloured faces of three smiling men, their sunglasses indicating that it is probably a sunny day. The background is painted in black. Makau said he was inspired by happy times spent with friends.

Along the same theme is In the Moment, which also has three happy faces. They are surrounded by twinkling stars and sparkling effects.

“Dark backgrounds help to bring out the subject,” said Makau, a second-year art student at Kenyatta University. He first started painting after high school to kill boredom.

Changing tack, Makau reflects on pleasant father-and-son moments in Within. The painting is of a Maasai man wearing sunglasses, the right lens of which has a reflection of two men in red shukas walking past a manyatta after grazing their cattle all day.

“The painting is about a person remembering how good the past was. The father is talking to the son about the ways of their culture,” he said.

Makau also likes to paint landscapes, which were his first theme when he started painting in 2015.

In Home is Where My Heart Is, Makau takes us to a typical village shopping centre. It is a straightforward image with the foreground taken up by a red-earth road. In the background is a line of shops emblazoned with the logos of telecoms companies, the standard decoration for many commercial buildings in rural areas today.

Kainuku, on the other hand, is an evocative image of a homestead situated in the arid northwestern Kenya. The bare red ground is littered with rocks and clumps of grass beneath a hazy blue, cloudless sky. Mudwalled-homes stand among the black silhouettes of trees with sunburned foliage. In this painting, I find Makau showing promise of developing depth and technique to produce captivating landscapes.

Makau’s art is currently showing at the Royal Nairobi Golf Club, and can be seen at the Nairobi Art Buyers’ Weekend, a monthly exhibition held at the Lavington Mall.