Wekesa’s trip from Tsavo to Turkana put on canvas

Whenever Camille Wekesa has an art exhibition, I have to be the first in line to see what this extraordinary Kenyan artist has conjured up out of her most fertile imagination. She had one last weekend in Muthaiga entitled ‘Jade & Silver’.

It hasn’t mattered if she was the artist exhibiting or if it was a show she had curated, something I have seen her do several times in the past. One time, it was at the CFC Stanbic Bank where she had assembled an awesome array of original portraits by Kenyan artists.

She had been inspired when visiting the bank’s home office in UK and found it had a massive portraiture collection which it had been growing for many years. I never found out if any of the paintings in her show became part of the bank’s ‘mother’ collection.

But it didn’t really matter to the myriad local art lovers who appreciated Camille’s ambitious initiative.

EXHIBITIONS

The other show she curated was destined to be exhibited in London (just as ‘Jade & Silver’ is about to be in early June). That exhibition was a two-hander in which she shared the ‘billing’ with one of Kenya’s leading pioneer painters, Ancent Soi.

Camille’s and Ancent’s paintings were previewed in Nairobi at the Russian Embassy for a week in 2012 before they were shipped off to UK where the two artists had a successful show at the Deborah Gage Gallery of Art on Bond Street.

It wasn’t long thereafter that Camille moved to Nanyuki, where she has been painting practically non-stop ever since. Between then and now, she has had one elegant one-woman exhibition at Red Hill Art Gallery. She has also been creating massive murals up at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya.

But Camille has also taken time to visit some of the most scenic spots in this country, two of which are being exquisitely featured in the show she previewed in Muthaiga which is now on its way to UK.

Camille entitled the works she’s been painting over the past two years ‘Jade & Silver’ after visiting Lake Turkana and Tsavo National Park and being deeply moved by what she had seen and felt.

“Lake Turkana is also known as the Jade Lake, and as I was spellbound when I first saw the lake, I wanted to keep the name in the title of this show,” says Camille, whose landscape portraits of that region are just as primordial, pristine and powerful as I remember it from when I went there some time ago.

She captures the majesty of those craggy mountains, a terrain that also feels as if it might have once been an abode for giants or extraterrestrial gods.

Out of the 30 odd paintings in her exhibition, only five or six reveal Camille’s humble fascination and almost reverential feeling for Turkana. The rest reveal another kind of awe that she experienced when she subsequently visited Tsavo Park.

TSAVO

Tsavo is a place she has been to many times before. But when she went there a year ago, the land was dry. The trees were plentiful but barren of leaves.

It was those bare but delicately entangled branches that led her to create a whole series of singularly delicate and dazzling trees whose branches are intricately interlaced in shimmering silvery mesh.

“Each tree took many days to complete,” says Camille whose painstaking labour, painting countless filigreed lines, curves and intersecting branches, is a marvel.

Another Kenyan artist, Mary Collis, was on hand for Camille’s Nairobi preview and suggested that the tree paintings were so precious it would be a pity if they weren’t kept intact. That is, if one individual or art institution couldn’t buy them all at once.

But as Camille had painted more than 20 separate trees, it didn’t seem like an idea that would fly unless a museum or a multimillionaire decided it was a divine idea!

Camille’s preview of Jade & Silver only lasted for a day. But in the course of that time, her one big problem had been so many admirers wanted to buy up her paintings that she had to put them on hold. Otherwise, she would have to dismantle her June exhibition and she could not do that.

So if her fans wished to buy her Tsavo or Turkana art, they would have to wait until it came back from abroad.

Either that or kiss their piece of Jade & Silver goodbye!