Artist with an eye for big women

In January this year, Richard Onyango was putting the final touches on a painting in his studio late at night when a breaking news item on the TV in the background caught his attention. The CNN announcer was breaking the news of the US Airways plane that crash-landed on Hudson River in New York.

By bizarre coincidence, Onyango was working on a painting of a plane crash-landing on a water surface. “When I overcame the initial shock of the coincidence, I realised that I had a title for my painting,” said the soft-spoken Onyango. “I called it Hudson River.”

Hay Festival

Speaking to a crowd of attentive listeners at the Storymoja Hay Festival last weekend, he continued, “The Hudson River coincidence made me vow to stop doing paintings on disaster stories. Every time I paint a disaster, it tends to happen.”

With the crowd hanging on his every word, Onyango went on to narrate an incident when he was commissioned to do a painting of a train disaster. “Three days later, my boss calls me to tell me that a train accident has occurred at Kathekani,” he said.

“I took my motorbike and drove all the way from Malindi, where I stay, to Kibwezi to see the accident. The only difference was that in my painting, the train was headed in the opposite direction.”

Onyango, as you might have gathered, is not your everyday painter. In his own admission, he says that his paintings do not come cheap. The smallest of his paintings, which measures 80 by 100 centimetres fetches the princely sum of Sh190,000, while the biggest one, measuring 200 by 300 cm goes for close to half a million.

“I do not set the price on my paintings,” he clarifies. “It is my clients who determine how much they are going to buy them at.” Onyango has exhibited his paintings in Europe and the US, where they are in great demand. “People out there really appreciate art,” he said.

Onyango, 47, was a special guest during the Storymoja Hay Festival, where Kwani? was launching The Life and Times of Richard Onyango, a book on his life.
And going by the title of his book, Onyango’s life is as interesting as the subject of his paintings, which features a lot.

He was brought up in Tana River, where his father was working as a civil servant in the irrigation schemes. “I spent most of my young life in the presence of big machinery and I used to admire them,” he said. “Then, there was only one bus coming around once a week, and everyone would look forward to seeing it.”

These early features of his life fascinated him and are constant features in his acclaimed paintings. “I am normally very observant of what is going on around me,” he said, adding that his observant nature has had a toll on his social life.

“That is the reason I am not married – all the women I’ve had relationships with end up getting angry with me. They accuse me of eyeing other women,” he said.

And Onyango loves painting women, especially big women. Among his most popular paintings are those of Drossie, a white woman he had a relationship with when he was a teenager.

His parents had sent him to Tudor Day Secondary School in Mombasa where he rented a small house while attending school. With the little pocket money he used to receive from his father, Onyango found the going quite hard. “I had to do odd jobs in order to make ends meet,” he says. At some point he became a drummer with a band that used to perform in tourist hotels.

That is how he met Drossie. One thing led to another and he found himself living in Drossie’s house. “I had not had any relations with a woman prior to this,” he said.