CAMILLE INVITES TOP ARTISTS TO TEACH RURAL YOUTH ART

CAMILLE BRINGS TOP ARTISTS TO LEWA TO TEACH RURAL YOUTH

                                                      Camille's mural at Lewa Conservancy 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (published 10 September)

Since moving up to Nanyuki seven years ago, Camille Wekesa rarely comes to Nairobi. But one of Kenya’s leading landscape artists had news she needed to share that has been simmering up at the Lewa Conservancy for many months.

Camille is best known for being a fabulous muralist although the walls that she has transformed into exquisite works of art are mainly housed upcountry.

Six rooms, inclusive of walls, ceilings and floors are up at the Ol Jogi Wildlife Conservancy. These gems of Camille’s creativity are museum-quality work and deserve to be on display for the world to see.

Her more recent murals are up at the Lewa Conservancy where Camille has been running a series of weekend art workshops with teens from the territory and a consistent flow of leading Kenyan artists teaching the youth everything from the basics of painting and woodcut printing to photography and ceramics created out of local clays.

“The children come from two of the twenty schools that Lewa has built as gestures of good will towards the community,” says Camille who initially proposed the idea of conducting art education classes to the Lewa board who endorsed her idea readily.

                                                  Camille's other mural at Lewa Conservancy

“The conservancies have realized that the best way to work with local communities is by assisting them in solving their problems,” says Camille, who adds the schools Lewa constructed were in remote areas of the Valley where no secondary schools existed before.

“The Lewa Art Education program have 30 teens from Lokusero Secondary and 35 from Ntugi Secondary,” she adds. Admitting that she isn’t one of the art teachers herself, Camille prefers to coordinate the program since she has several projects of her own underway.

“Since the art education program began, we have invited two professional Kenyan artists to come at a time,” she explains. “I send a taxi to their homes so they arrive by midday on a Friday. Then they work with the youth a half-day, then a full day Saturday, and finally, another half-day on Sunday, before the taxi takes them home by early evening,” she adds.

Thus far, Camille has invited a rich variety of local artists who she stresses get a stipend for their artistic labor. “We don’t believe that artists are always meant to be donating their skills,” she says. Nor does she go along with the notion that artists are always meant to be poor.

Art education is something that Camille believes in strongly, and hopes that programs like hers will stimulate greater interest in the Government to revive an ‘examinable’ arts program in the national curriculum soon.

“I’m told that arts education has been partially restored to the school syllabus, but it is not examinable,” she says, recalling how fortunate she was to attend Kenyan schools that had arts programs. They prepared her well to go to Italian art colleges, first in Florence, then in Rome and Milan. “It was six years in total,” she says.

Among the artists who have given hands-on art classes at Lewa are a long list of local luminaries: Patrick Mukabi, Peterson Kamwathi, Kevin Oduor, Beatrice Wanjiku, MaryAnn Muthoni, Justus Kyalo, Tonney Mugo, Beatrice Wanjiku, King Dodge, Allan Githuka, Fitsum Behre and his wife Nicole, John Silver, Syowia Kyambi and her colleague Kibe, among others.

Meanwhile, Camille has a range of other projects she’s pursuing at her home outside Nanyuki. One is a new Primate Protection Program that she and her neighbors just started. “We have been re-planting trees so extensively that the wildlife has returned to the area. Thus, we wanted to find ways to work with people like the National Museums of Kenya to protect our revitalized habitat,” she says, having just come from a meeting with a NMK primate specialist before she met with BDLife.

The other project that Camille is involved with is painting a series of eight iconic landscapes in Kenya that are World Heritage sites. Her plan is to house each set of eight murals in a separate cottage as a form of documentation and possibly viewer attraction.

The eight sites that she will be painting are the Aberdares, Mount Kenya, Maasai Mara, Samburu, Tsavo, Tuurkana, the Great Rift Valley, and the Taita Kaya Mounds. None of this series will be for sale, she says.

         

                                                                      One of Camille's murals painted at Ol Jogi

“I will paint similar views in oils on canvas which can be exhibited and sold. But I am concerned with documenting the beauty of this country as we see it today, so the murals will remain intact.”