ANNE MWITI,
GLOBAL AWARD-WINNING PAINTER
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 20.2.2018 but written 4.2016)
Don’t let
her diminutive and delicate demeanor deceive you. Anne Mwiti is no ordinary
doctoral candidate in fine art at Kenyatta University. She’s actually an
award-winning Kenyan artist who’s exhibited her work both locally and
internationally, and on one occasion even shared gallery space with no less an
imminent person than the late, great South African Head of State Nelson Mandela
who’d occupied a fair amount of time while incarcerated on Robbin Island
learning to paint. He also managed to assemble a substantial collection of
works which the Belgravia Gallery in London managed to obtain so as to include
in their 2014 World Citizen Artists Award Exhibition.
Anne Mwiti
was also in that exhibition, only she had first taken part in the Awards
Competition as did hundreds of other artists from all round the world. The
difference between them and her is that she was one of the top 15 finalists
selected to feature in the prestigious global arts show.
Another
difference is that she was the only African (and one of the few women) to be
among those top 15. But probably most important of all, Anne earned First Prize
for her highly symbolic abstract painting that depicted her perspective on war
and peace, including her deep-seated feelings derived from her personal
experience of Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence.
Using
multiple layers of white and black acrylic paint, Anne’s painting looks
deceptively simple. The upper half is white symbolizing peace, justice and hope
while the lower half is jet black, symbolizing the antithetical themes of
death, destruction and war.
There are
two more colored lines in her painting which she includes where the basic black
and white colors converge. One is red, symbolic of the bloodshed in times of
war generally, and specifically, during Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence.
The other color line is green, again significant of the fertility, lush
abundance and prosperity that can come once there’s peace and reconciliation
established among the former adversaries.
The key to
the painting’s meaning is first in the title ‘A Stitch in Time’ and then in the
threaded needle that’s been used to cross-stitch across the antithetical colors
but which has been left dangling half-way through the color lines.
Explaining
that her painting (which she’s now selling for Sh1 million in her Karen Village
studio) has an interactive feature to it, Anne said that peacemakers are meant
to pick up the needle and complete the cross-stitching.
“It’s meant
to signify that the reconciliation process [on both a global and a local level]
has yet to be completed, but there is a way forward if people will only
continue working to make it happen.”
Anne went to
London to receive her award in late 2014, after which she returned to KU where
she’s been teaching, mentoring, mounting art exhibitions and mothering her two
children ever since. She’s also married to man who she says is extremely
supportive of her work and the sort of hours only a workaholic can keep.
Anne admits
that she could be called a workaholic except that she’s been a high-energy
activist all her life, especially from age five when her father, the head
teacher at her Rwanderi Primary School in rural Meru County first put a pencil
in her hand and got her started drawing and painting.
Her father
also taught her Mathematics and English, but since he was an artist in his
spare time, he’d sit with his first born child for hours, prodding her to paint
and advising her on how to enhance her drawing.
Anne loved
the rural life and took part in all the domestic chores that other little girls
had to do, like fetching firewood and water from the river. The only difference
between them and her was that the land on which they played belonged to her
family, so she really didn’t have to work that hard. “But it was so much fun
since we all saw it not as hard work but as play,” she said.
From her
mother, Anne learned to stitch, crochet and knit. “I used to make my own dolls
out of maize husks and then stitch clothes for them.” That early experience is
partly what inspired her painting “A Stitch in Time”.
But as much
as her imaginative upbringing prepared her to become both an artist and mentor,
Anne is curious about what changes make children lose their early spontaneity
and inhibit their imagination. That’s what she’s currently researching for her
doctorate, which is why she spent the last six months teaching art to children
in Kibera slum.
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