ROSEMARY
KARUGA, MASTERFUL COLLAGE ARTIST
By Margaretta wa Gacheru (re-posted 7 November 2017 for Saturday Nation)
Rosemary Karuga is nearly 90 years old. But Kenya’s most senior woman artist is still going strong. She lives abroad with her daughter, but she’s still creating the art form for which she’s renowned, a painterly style of paper collage.
Rosemary was
recently named ‘Artist of the month’ by the National Museums of Kenya’.
Coincidentally, she’s called a ‘Master Collage Artist’ by Red Hill Gallery where her first solo exhibition in years just opened, running through December
3rd.
Being Kenya’s first woman artist to study at
Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Fine Art [from 1950-52],
Rosemary is a living legend. But she didn’t come into her own professionally
until the 1980s after she’d retired from teaching art in local primary schools.
At Makerere,
she’d specialized in sculpture but once she got married and returned to Kenya,
there were no funds for a kiln so her art had to go on hold. Then by the time
she was ready to get back to work, she still lacked the funds to buy the art
materials she required.
That’s how
Rosemary began creating collage art, using the paper packaging from Rexona soap
and Unga flour. But even using those basic colors, the skill, beauty and
imagination of her art was apparent.
Having been
a classmate of Paa ya Paa’s Elimo Njau at Makerere, Rosemary got back on her
artistic ‘feet’ taking up a four-month artist’s residency at Paa ya Paa with
the Njaus.
Recalling
how Rosemary found her way back into Elimo’s life, Phillda Njau explained that
in 1987, the long-lost artist magically reappeared right when Paa ya Paa was
planning a ‘Women in Art in East Africa” exhibition with Goethe Institute. “Rosemary
said she wanted to come back into the local art world, so her timing was
perfect,” Phillda said. “It was after that show that Rosemary worked as an
artist-in-residency at Paa ya Paa for several months,” she added.
In a radio
interview with the BBC Art House, Rosemary explained she’d been commissioned in
1990s to illustrate Amos Tutuola’s magical book, ‘The Palm Wine Drinker’ which
subsequently led to her collage ‘illustrations’ being exhibited in Paris, then
in London and later in the Studio Museum in Harlem, USA.
The Paris
exhibition included a trip to France for Rosemary who told BBC how much she was
impressed by Parisians who were highly appreciative of fine art and who also honored
the artists. She added it wasn’t that
way in Kenya where her international reputation didn’t put bread on her table. That
is how, when times were tough, she ended up selling her collages ‘for a song’ to
Sarang Gallery. Over time, Sarang’s Mahindra Shah acquired a good number of her
works, quite a few of which are in the Red Hill show. The rest are either on
loan from the National Museum or from the Rossler-Musch’s private collection.
Rosemary wasn’t
able to attend her exhibition opening. But what stands out in her collage art
is both the delicacy of her attention to detail and her appreciation of rural
life. She create collage ‘paintings’ of everyone from shephards and water or
wood carriers to farmers, families, landscapes and wildlife. Still ‘painting’ with colored papers which are
now carefully cut from glossy magazines (not Unga sacks), her collage art has a
sweet feeling of almost childlike naivete. But her nuanced approach to color
shading with finely shredded and carefully glued lines makes her collages look
almost impressionistic and certainly worthy of the kind of honor that Rosemary
saw Parisians give to their favorite painters, be it Renoir, Degas or Picasso.
Currently,
the National Museum is said to own quite a few more Rosemary Karuga collages.
One hopes that in future the Museum can bring out all those precious collage
‘paintings’ by Rosemary and give them a permanent pride of place for the world
to see. For if there is one Kenyan artist who deserves to be recognized and
even awarded by this country for her contribution to contemporary Kenyan art,
it is Rosemary. And she deserves it now, in her lifetime.
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