Death Of An Artist

Uganda Tue 03-11-2009

Death Of An Artist
By David Kaiza/Africancolours.com

GEOFFREY MUKASA, 1954-2009

The last time I saw Geoffrey Mukasa was early 2007 when coming out of the workshop I kept just outside of Kampala, I found him having a drink in an adjacent bar and I joined him and we discussed the problems of communicating art to the general public.

He was interested in that topic and we talked at length about art and the media and I told him my plans to start an art magazine in Kampala, which later materialized into START.

Untitled by Geofrey Mukasa

Our meeting before that chance encounter had been at an opening in Tulifanya and we had sat having coffee. He was reticent and I thought it was because I had commented on the tendency of some abstract artists to simply throw paint about and expect to get paid.

Mukasa, I thought, did not want to get drawn into that line of talk and I changed the topic. But soon I found that reticence was something he had in great abundance.

I had already had a taste of his silence years earlier, in 2002 when I first wrote about his work at Tulifanya which had over the years become home to his art. (The quality and seriousness of his work matched Tulifanya’s faultless display.)

I had not seen art like his before – the radiance of the colours, the shock of seeing humans realised like that with the rabbit-in-headlamp eyes that you don’t forget. Then there were all the chickens and bottles of beer and fruits.

I was immensely excited and sought out the man, going at him with a torrent of questions. As an art-writer, you know it when you meet an artist whose work brings out the best in your critique.

Mukasa simply stared back at me, face as unmoving as the figures he so represented. I thought his eyebrows lifted a little, but before I could read what that meant, he was distant again, as if he was uninterested in me. Then he simply scratched his hair and all the questions I had prepared disappeared.

From that day on, I was always nervous whenever asking Mukasa questions about his art. Then in 2007, he seemed to have warmed up a little.

Hence in October this year, when I walked into the Makerere University Gallery where they had works themed around independence (Uganda’s Independence Day falls on 9th October), I saw one of Mukasa’s pictures and lost interest in the other works.

Of all the artists in Uganda, he challenged me the most – not least because he never answered many of my questions - and I asked the Gallery attendant for his contacts.

Emergency by Geofrey Mukasa

The man hesitated. Then he said “Mukasa died”

I stared into space in loss.

Back in 2002 when I first met Mukasa’s art, it came to me as both new and old. It was new because it gestured in directions different to the art I was used to seeing in Kampala.

The Makerere University art school puts a stamp of structure and composition on its students’ work which you can easily recognize. Mukasa, born in 1954, who spent part of his childhood in the King’s palace in Buganda and who in the 1970s left the country and studied in Lucknow, India, returning to the country in the ‘80s where he worked at the national television as a graphic artist for a while, before the expansion of the artistic scene in the ‘90s which gave vent to his art, was not a product of Makerere.

Working from a palette consisting mostly of blues, his colours were very alive. This aspect he shared with most artists in the country. But his colours had some extra, for they were not just vibrant, but seemed to practically vibrate. Then there was the matter of his subjects and this is how his work seemed old:

It is the eyes in his work that strike and remain with you. Wide and shocked, they stare straight at and through you. Immediately I thought of the Gorgon and through it, the Greek classical figures. The colours did not come from Uganda, I could see that instantly. Though painters have often commented on the intensity of light in Africa, Mukasa’s palette seemed to depict to me, not what he saw around him (though his blues are sky-blue); his greens and reds and magentas, seemed to depict states of the mind.

Hence, the colours and the eyes intermixed to make me think his work was psychological. Was it also spiritual? It is easy to say that but that can be a slippery slope and you need to know the artist better to start along such lines. I put it to him; he side-stepped the question, giving vague, general explanations:

A secretive man, I concluded. But in time, I knew he would open up. Artists like him, with their vast knowledge of things and places, I found, can be weary of speaking to journalists who they see as illiterate about art.

I stood at the Tulifanya exhibition discussing his work with other artists and we talked about cubism and that inevitably led us to Picasso and African masks. We talked about his education. I noted that he painted his figures with the bright blues and lavenders and violets you see on Hindu gods, although I did not want to make the connection, as influences can be overstated.

Given the artist’s silence and the idiosyncrasies of his work, I decided to do what I usually did. I merely described his art and the manner in which it hit me:

It was easier to describe than to interpret. Interpretation being more uncertain, it was the initial impact of it that I went off with, after all, I was just starting with him.

Untitled by Geofrey Mukasa

He mostly composed in blue and the few pictures that were not sheds of blue were mostly dashes of reds and browns – colours done, it seemed, at their most heartbreaking temperatures. There was a sense of the cozy, but cozy as a heightened state of experience where nothing is allowed to be dull or tyrannically ponderously. His figures appear like dream creatures. He was a man with a subject – the subject I suppose others called an “ism”, which made you think long and hard.

Of the abundance of mangoes and oranges and bananas he did in hot colours, I did not fully grasp – the point about the fertile and the abundant being rather obvious.

But of the hot topic - his faces - I found myself shying away from tackling that directly perhaps because I felt the direction they might head to would be unhinging and I could not avoid thinking that his reticence and his distance came from deep, maybe from what caused the shock in those eyes or where they stare into.

It was the one of the element in his work I was saving for the future.

His faces tended to be long, the aquiline nose dropping sharply beneath terrifying eyes, shapely heads with curly, unruly hair. Somewhat stylized, it is as though the artist’s soul was trapped in something and he constantly gravitated around the area of impact.

Terrifying - I remember that word dropping into my mind the first time. But if terrifying, then also terrified, and this is where possibilities started to suggest themselves.

Coming from a country like Uganda and given the circumstances of the 1970s Kampala that he left, it was inevitable that one was going to think he was giving a sense of what a history means to a people. Were his eyes in anyway a statement on the permanent state of shock and horror his country seemed to lurch into decade after decade?

Or perhaps, was that interpretation too easily made? The eyes, when you are alone in the Gallery, stare at you from all angles and seem to have homed in on your soul.

“Soul” was another word that came with “Terrifying” and seemed a much safer descriptor, one which forgave the initial, rush, politicization. But was the soul not an old-fashioned thing anyway?

If his use of the human eyes owes much to his Indian education, then he used them to tell a darker tale, for Indian depictions of the human face are generally of warmth and spiritual ecstasy. His are of figures that seem to have lost peace and appear to ask why they must not have it.

Was I not imposing too much meaning on the man’s work? At any rate, it was not possible to interpret Mukasa the same way one interpreted Kampala’s new sprout of artists. Just getting to 50 at the time, he was already an elder statesman of the easel in a country where art had died during the 70s and 80s and was undergoing redefinition by hands barely walking by the time he left the country.

Mukasa’s career traces the traumatic history of the country whose collapse in 1971 sent its professionals and artists into exile. Returning in the 1980s, he came to a country with little use for art and made a living partly doing graphics for television.

With the resurgence of creativity in the 1990s, he was a kind of bridge between the art of the immediate post-colonial years - where the art propagated at Makerere put greater emphasis on technique and whatever subject there was, was symbolically presented - and the 2000s where something between subjectivity and youthful overdrive has taken charge but is still searching for a subject.

Mukasa more than any other artists, dug into the human subject and did art that balanced form with subject with greater facility and mastery than his compatriots. He was a man you could talk about endlessly and from many angles.

“He had a special ism, which others did not have,” Josephine Mukasa (no relation), a curator at Tulifanya Gallery says.

Is it a religious transfiguration that has held his subjects for so long? He reproduced these over and over – seemed to have settled into a kind of pastoral idyll, uninterested in the hustle and bustle of the big and dynamic.

Yet if they appear to penetrate into your soul, is it also that they are merely stylized forms? There is doubtless, more than meets the eye, not least because of his complex background. His work invites allusions: is it psychoanalytic; is it a report of something gone terribly wrong somewhere beyond the canvas? Are we being asked to account?

“Because he trained in India, you see that combination of the Indian approach to art and his Ugandan approach,” Josephine says. “I don’t know if it is psychological. He lived in Uganda and we are very colourful. It is an intermarriage of different approaches.”

These are questions the artist will not answer directly now and walking out of the Makerere Gallery, it hit me that this was the first artist I have engaged with in the past decade who has died. It is as if a gallery had burned down.

More intensely, his death put art in perspective for me; art in Uganda, like much of everything else, has gone through interruptions and with the passing of Mukasa, a man whose work seemed to stand for triumph over the breakage of lives, you see the fragility that creativity can easily slip into when a society is constantly unstable. It is telling that he died a month after the riots that rocked southern Uganda in September signaled a new round of turmoil.

Josephine describes Mukasa as a man well-regarded by younger artists, an individualist who approached his work singularly.

In October, Tulifanya showed what would have been his final exhibition had he not died before the show opened.

They are a collection of some 44 paintings, ranging from very large to very small. In it, all of Mukasa is there. Three large paintings abound with the excess of life – the drummers and the fruit bearers, a congestion of vitality almost. He lavishes the human body and they come out as if light were bathing them from all directions.

One painting, simply titled Collage Paper, is different from what he usually paints. A portrait almost, curly, luxuriant hair cascades down the head, it was different to the rest of the show. The nose bends to the left above hot red lips. The face is black on one side and white on the other in the classical Africa mask depiction.

I lingered before it longer. The eyes seem at peace, almost vacuous. There was none of the blue he uses elsewhere and this intrigued me. In a moment of absent-mindedness, I thought of asking the artist to explain it, and then…I would have to find my own explanations for his work from now on, and this was odd, reminding me again how our contemporary art is so young.

There were so many things I would never understand. But as I walked out of Tulifanya, I got a sense of finality, of things drawing to a close. It made me think of art differently, as urgent; there was a stake above and beyond creation of beauty.

There was something immensely sad and instructive about the trajectory of his career – which speaks of the powerlessness in the circumstance of the lives of people in places like Uganda, how factors beyond our control bequeath to us that which we become.

It occurred to me later that I had unconsciously been expecting that the years of the 1970s would be redeemed, for Mukasa and for us vicariously and his death seemed to have denied us the denouement.

A lot was redeemed of course, for the singularity of Mukasa’s talent speaks of the personal strength he so mustered.

Tulifanya intends to keep him alive by exhibiting in future, prints of his work, which would also be one way of supporting his young family. It was not a wasted life, for Mukasa gave his country and art new insights and the number of artists he influenced, and the courage to be individual will live on.

“He’s a great loss in the sense that he has his own style,” Josephine says. “He’s still living because of his ism.”

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Geoffrey Okoth Yoga: David, its a great lose. John Yoga the East African's greatest mosaic artist,exibiting at Gallery Watatu died in 1992 at the age of 45.A graduate of margaret school of fine art and an art teacher may God rest his soul

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