CAMILLE’S INCREDIBLE TREES

 By Margaretta wa Gacheru (September 2020)

While trees are literally going up in smoke everywhere from California and Oregon to the Amazon jungles of Brazil and the Mediterranean isles of Greece, Camille Wekesa’s exquisite online exhibition of treescapes, which coincidentally is up currently at Red Hill Art Gallery, entitled ‘Lattices’ provides a timely reminder. It is that trees are not only endangered but beautiful. They are precious but they also play an integral role in the global eco-system. (Professor Wangari Maathai used to describe rainforests like the Amazon or the Aberdares as the lungs of Mother Earth since they imbibe carbon dioxide and then release fresh oxygen for us humans to breathe. Hers was cautionary wisdom, meaning for us to protect those forests since they help us to stay alive!)

Kenya has already lost a lot of its forest cover in the last few decades. But Camille’s meticulous portraits of everything from acacias and baobabs to thorn trees and flame trees, painted both in oils on canvas and tempera on panels don’t allow us to be complacent about the country’s remaining indigenous trees. Her passion for protecting and preserving trees could easily be compared to other environmentalists’ dedication to saving elephants, rhinos and giraffes, all of which are threatened with extinction if human beings don’t change their ways and take care of them.

Camille’s care is conveyed in treescapes that have both a realist feeling since they are set within natural landscapes (however scarcely those horizons, hills or skies can be seen through the thick interlacing of branches that pervade practically all her paintings).

But a few of her works have a decidedly surreal sensibility as in a painting like “Sunlit Acacias’ which presents gracious acacias growing up amidst billowing golden grass. And even more surreal is her ‘Majestic Baobab’ which has a Siamese-twin-like trunk that is so anatomically muscular and precise that it practically could pass for a headless yogi doing a grand stand except that his brawny upside down legs can’t quite get together. They are flailing in different directions with finger-like branches reaching for the sky.

That is not to say her surrealist works are any less beautiful. Camille is a specialist in landscape painting having studied fine art both in Kenya and abroad. Her focus on trees is not new although her painting of delicate yet entangled branches and gracefully sinuous limbs in lustrous latticed layers is new.

In at least one of her previous tree exhibitions, she detailed her trees in gold leaf. But in ‘Lattices’, she uses a luminous pearl pigment to detail and highlight her interlacing lines. In so doing, her trees have a hypnotic effect of drawing one into the depths of their entangled realms, as if each tree had a complex history told in hues of blue-grey, green, black, radiant white and brown. She paints each one as if she knows them all by heart, giving each a vitality that explains the incredible intensity of their entangled limbs.

But even as the branches of nearly all her trees intertwine as if they could keep growing ad infinitum, virtually none of them have leaves on their boughs, which is one more surrealist element of her art.

Lattices is not her first exhibition of trees, nor is it likely to be last. She grew up surrounded by trees in Western Kenya, which is probably why there is such a feeling of intimacy about this show. But while her trees dominate nearly every painting, there are works like ‘Sunrise in Laikipia’ and ‘Dream’ that reveal Wekesa’s wonderful capacity for blending colors to create subtle skies that radiate sunny glows behind billowing clouds and grey-blue skies.

Having studied art both in Kenya and overseas, (specifically in Florence and Rome) it’s no wonder that camille’s skills show up in both her magical mix of genres as well as her marvelous sense of perspective. The latter shows up as one explores those parts of her paintings beyond and behind her trees. That’s where one gets an inkling of the horizon and the living landscape providing the context of her trees.

One also finds living creatures hidden behind her trees. They’re barely visible in works like ‘Family Gathering’ and ‘Ripples’ since the lattices of tree branches are so intense that the elands and gazelles can hardly be seen. There might be other beings enmeshed amidst Camille’s trees. As in a beautiful piece like ‘Desert Rose’, which is the one tree in the show that is covered in flowers and leaves.