Pitfalls Of Fame And Fortune

Kenya Mon 27-07-2009

Pitfalls Of Fame And Fortune
By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Joseph ‘Bertiers’ Mbatia now knows the pitfalls of fame and good fortune. The award winning Kenya artist came to national attention in 2006 when, in the same year, he not only won the First Kenya Juried Art Competition at the French Cultural Centre and got a free ride all over France and Germany. He also won one of the top ten slots at the Dakar ‘Dakart’ Biennale, which entitled him to a three month art residency in Marseilles, also in France.

^{Joseph 'Bertiers' Mbatia with his sculpture the African Woman}

“It was a great year for me, and it was the first time I ever set foot on an airplane,” recalls Bertiers, who admits living in five-star luxury for those few days was a bit lonely.

”I was often the only African in the room, and since I didn’t speak the language, I often had to resort to drawing pictures to get things I needed.”

But Bertiers wasn’t complaining about all the museums, cathedrals and galleries he got to feast his eyes on while abroad. What was unfortunate however was the fact that his all-expenses-paid trips to Dakar and Europe were scheduled simultaneously. So he had to make a choice.

And that is where the problem lay. Since he never got to Dakar, he never got to ensure that all his art work came home with him. Instead, his award winning work got stuck at the Kenya Port Authority where it eventually got auctioned for a fraction of its value, since nobody paid the duty required.

“The blessing became a curse,” said Mbatia, who never expected his art would cost him a fortune to retrieve. “It was an Asian who bought up my art at a throw away price,” but the Asian was savvy enough to resell it at a profit to RaMoMA Museum of Modern Art.

But that is not the worst of his misfortunes. Having cut his foot badly soon after his trip overseas, Mbatia was out of commission for several months, during which time the Marseilles residency fell through.

^{Political wedding by Joseph 'Bertiers' Mbatia}

Meanwhile, the East African Biennale in Dar es Salaam became another venue for Bertiers to lose control of his work. “There’s one sculpture that the former British High Commissioner wanted to buy, but it never came home from Dar,” bemoaned Mbatia.

The sculpture, known as “Oppression” or “The Rich Man Sits on the Pauper” is emblematic, says Mbatia, of what happens to poor people all over the world.

“I’ve been waiting three years for that sculpture to come back to me,” says Mbatia, who not only regrets he hasn’t seen his work for all that time; he also lost the sale.

But what he did gain by showing his work in Dar in 2006 was the visibility that inspired Scandinavian curator Heine Thorup to invite him to take part in Africa Now! Traveling first to Denmark in 2008 and then to Norway early this year as part of Africa Now, what struck Mbatia the most about these journeys up north was first, to see how highly esteemed artists are in that part of the world.

“Artists are not only well respected,” noted Mbatia. “Their governments also take special care of their artists, unlike governments around here.”

But Mbatia doesn’t waste much time complaining vocally about politics in Kenya. Instead, his art – both his paintings and his sculptures - speaks volumes about local politics as well as about global affairs.

In one painting, for instance, one might find Raila and Kibaki on the same canvas with Hillary Clinton, Kofi Annan and Tony Blair! Called “Cake-Sharing”, Mbatia turns out to be a specialist in political satire. His paintings are often crowded with celebrities as diverse as Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson to Uhuru Kenyatta, Martha Karua or Kilonzo Musyoka. His sculpture is on less satiric and explicit, although it tends to be slightly more symbolic, as when the fat cat tycoon sits atop the impoverished peasant.

In fact, for as long as he has been painting, Mbatia has been drawing on the daily news for inspiration and ideas about what to create. Trained at the YMCA Craft Training Center in the early 1980s, Mbatia was entertaining people with his drawing as far back as primary school in Waithaka. And even in secondary school at Dagoretti, he was drawing in ways that excited local audiences.

^{Bus terminus III by Joseph 'Bertiers' Mbatia}

“The YMCA course was actually in commercial art, so I was employed for a time with Chibuku to do sign writing,” he said. But even while employed, he was painting in bars and tea cafes from Kariobangi to Uthiru to Karinde where he now stays.

The most consistent place he first showed his satiric paintings was at the Wasafiri Café in Dagoretti, where the owner Mr. Kiarie didn’t mind him filling his hotel walls with paintings depicting everything from City Council evictions to the OJ Simpson trial.

“I used to put my paintings up and rotate them everyday, and then sit quietly while sipping tea and listen to what people had to say about my art,” said Mbatia who loved local people’s commentaries on his art. “People didn’t know I was the artist, so they talk about the work being by a crazy man.”

One day in 1985, an American named Ernie Wolfe walked into the Wasafiri and bought up all 16 of Mbatia’s paintings for KSh1, 800, which seemed like a whole lot of money at the time. Thus, a long term relationship between Wolfe and Mbatia began whereby the artist would receive a small advance, paint 20 paintings at a go and then post them to Wolfe in California.

That relationship worked well for both men up until Mbatia decided to have a one man exhibition at the Goethe Institute in 1992. Suddenly, he got noticed by the media, was featured on TV, and the rest is history, as they say. But Wolfe wasn’t very happy with Mbatia’s new-found fame.

“He even called me long distance and expressed his displeasure with all the media exposure I was getting,” recalled Mbatia who said Wolfe had friends at the Carnivore and Tamarind Restaurants.

Mbatia’s brand of social realism has definitely earned him a following among socially conscious agencies like GTZ and others concerned with the eradication of poverty, AIDS, drug abuse and democratization. But it’s not as if he needs to be tutored to create art that generates social awareness and rouses controversy and debate.

He’s so grounded in the lives of ordinary Kenyan people that their problems, politics and earthly pleasures are everywhere evident in his art, which is one of the main reasons why Mbatia is one of Kenya’s most widely regarded artists in the country today.

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