Richard Onyango

Born in 1960 in what is now Kisii county, Onyango was barely a toddler when his family relocated to Tana River after his father found a job with the National Irrigation Board in 1961. It was his upbringing in Malindi, then a small urban metropolis along Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline that served as a precursor to his fascination with planes, trucks, bulldozers, and tractors. And it’s this interest in such industrial machinery that would shape his oeuvre.

 

Curiously, Onyango speaks about his evolution into a visual artist as a fascination with the pressing desire to capture his immediate observable environment. ‘I had spent my time drawing and wandering around Hola in my machines. I was interested in recording things – everything I saw that fascinated me, I wanted to draw or paint.’ 

 

The Land Rover Series dates from experiences he had while travelling in his father’s Land Rover. And yet despite his evolution into a visual artist, it’s not quite what neither he nor his father had envisioned. Often impressed by the respectable life Provincial and District commissioners led, his father wanted him to become one. Onyango would, however, confide in him about his dream to become a truck driver, something that got his father infuriated and disappointed. But still Onyango wouldn’t let go of his dream.

 

The Malindi-based artist drew attention to his drawing and painting skills while in high school at Tudor Day Secondary School. Seemingly, the monthly pocket money he received from his father was, according to him, barely enough to survive until the next remittance. Like anyone, he had to find a way to earn a few extra coins. And what better way than make use of his budding drawing skills.

 

‘Slowly I started to use my drawing skills. I would watch matatus at the stage, make a drawing of them, and sell them for 20 shillings to the matatu drivers.’ Onyango narrated to Binyavanga in The Life and Times of Richard Onyango.

 

His painstakingly observed likenesses were, for buses ferrying passengers to and from the countryside, the first of their kind. Sooner his portrait of the Tana River Bus Company’s Peponi bus found its way to the owner of the bus company, Mr. Mohammed Lalji. This earned him a meeting with Mr. Lalji and free bus services every time he went home from school and vice versa. And with his subsequent bus portraits growing more popular, he piqued the interest of another bus proprietor; Mr. Marzi, owner of the Coast Bus Company.

 

In an ensuing meeting, Mr. Marzi was impressed at the artist’s visual intelligence and keen sense of detail. So, not only did he reveal to Onyango that he was an illustrator, something he didn’t know but he also awarded him a gig: 

“…Then he told me he wanted a very good picture showing the day-service and the night-service of Coast Bus.”

 

Crucially, real life experiences were central to the creation of his artworks but perhaps more significant, was his near perfect powers of visual recall. Coupled with his self-assured sense of concept development, the final piece was just as incredible as if appropriated from a picture. For an artist who found inspiration from lived experience, already fascinated with preserving it through art, it was only a matter of time before Onyango “announced” himself to high net-worth collectors.

 

Living in a town with a palpable presence of Italians, made more vivid by its rise as an Italian destination in a post-colonial Kenya, it would be Salenco, a local Italian who ‘spotlighted’ his entry into the international commercial art world. Perhaps, this is why a significant number of his exhibitions have been based in Italy.

 

While evoking an element of social satire, Onyango’s spectacular figurations of his fascination with machines against a backdrop of an insufficiently developed road infrastructure precisely illuminates the rapidly transforming landscape that was once unfettered and hardly navigable via vehicles. But it’s the roads’ impassable nature and machines’ (especially the buses’) struggle at navigating such terrain that intimately speaks to Onyango’s practice.

 

Exhibiting in one of Kenya’s hottest galleries of the 80s, Onyango was on a course to become one of the best high-selling visual artists of the post-independence crop. 

 

Outstanding among Onyango’s artworks are his memorable/memoir-esque works depicting the deceased Drosie Dawes. Frank Whalley – an art critic and consultant who’s knowledge of the East African Artist’s knows no bounds described her as ‘a woman of monumental proportions.’ Yes. The buxom brunette lady. But forget for a moment about her cavernous figure. She was a British medical doctor of Indian origin with whom Onyango would fall in love. She was a British medical doctor of Indian origin with whom Onyango would fall in love. The pair met in Nyali beach during a live band performance where the renowned visual artist was a drummer in the local band: Bahari Boys Band.

 

Onyango writes in his book, The Salamba Night about how they met: 

“So as I was beating my drum-set plates, my eyes caught (sic) a Big Fat-thick blonde lady leaving her seat coming to move near my drum set.

 

SHE WAS WEARING A CREAM dress which looked very expensive like linen-velvet. She looked at me as she passed near my drum set in front of me to somewhere… I changed the beats as she passed and she gave me a broad smile. I accepted and responded to her smile with a smile too.”

 

The unfortunate death of his lovely Drosie awakened in him the quest to represent, perhaps even immortalise, on canvas, their short-lived but intense life together. In the gripping series, he allows us to follow his intimate life with Drosie, both real and imagined in an entertaining yet provocative manner. Any preconceived notions on what is deemed appropriate and decorous, especially from a conservative lens would make you uncomfortable in the presence of his series on Drosie. Accepted Love is one such example. The Salambo Night Trailer, Drosie and Me are other examples.

Like Brush Wanyu, Onyango worked through the night creating his art, but unlike Brush’s grotesque, and idiosyncratic artworks, Onyango’s practice seems to, albeit arguably, border between pop art and surrealism. But do not limit the enigmatic artist entirely within the realms of drawing and painting. Yes, he has also been into sculpting the subjects of his memorable past experiences. And a collection of his sculptures could be found at his Malindi home.

 

Ultimately, his work, it could be said, is of documentary intention – focused on acknowledging and remembering significant moments of his life experiences, at the centre, road disasters and his lover Drosie in many capacities. Instances where arable and modern technology collide dominate in his artworks. To this end, the internationally acclaimed artist has held several shows both locally and abroad. His first exhibition on the international scene was at the Mamco – musée d´art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, 1999.