African Paintings of People and Wildlife

We met Wycliffe Chagwi on several occasions on a trip to Africa. A solemn man, Wycliffe Chagwi is a character immersed in obvious talent. He is a self taught artist who gets his ideas for African paintings of people from photograph subjects and life that he sees on a day to day basis in his country of Kenya, East Africa. Chagwi's African paintings of people show his compassion as he paints the innocence and shamelessness of children living in rural areas of his homeland villages. Some of them are painted with gourds and are from the Maasai tribe. But Chagwi also does wildlife paintings, especially elephant paintings. 

This African painter towers at about 6 foot 4 inches and has a strong body bulk. Like any Kenyan, he has strong command of the Kiswahili language, but struggles with the secondary language of English. He sobers his language with the preference of a warm Guiness beer. 

Personally, Chagwi is easy to talk to. When we first met, we talked and laughed for a good hour or so before moving on to his African art paintings. Anyone watching us would never had guessed that this was our first meeting together! What we found through our meetings was that Chagwi loves his country of Kenya and is very loyal to it, expressing this loyalty and love through his original African paintings of people and animal wildlife.

Wycliffe Chagwi remembers as a child feeling frustrated when he was first learning African languages. He found that he could express himself better in pictures than in language and so would draw instead what his emotions were telling him. He further practiced his African art by drawing from memories collected in his mind earlier in the day of people he had remembered seeing in his village going about their daily activities.

But Chagwi began making his African artwork for sale as a teenager and says that his role as an African artist has developed from being a struggling painter in the late 1990's to something so great now that he considers it a "lifetime job." "Every day I get people calling me for paintings" Chagwi says. "I get to practice like never before, but the life as an artist is a lonely one."

He says that in Kenya, citizens of the country "don't appreciate African artists. I wind up selling my artworks to visitors of my country and collectors from various parts of the world. It's a separated audience. They are not unified and come in from scattered locations, not necessarily from Kenya, where one might think my main audience would be."

A challenge he says all artists face in East Africa is that "the price of the art materials are too high" thus diluting some of the potential talent artists can express by having the right materials.

Chagwi keeps at his contemporary African art though because he believes in them and is one of the few artists in Kenya who has enough customers so that he can make a living out of painting. He is not intending to stop. He encourages other African artists to also continue so that they and the whole genre will one day become more well known.

Wycliffe Chagwi is one of our favorites here at our online African art paintings gallery. This is due to the somber and dynamic character behind his African paintings. The quality of his work and the subjects in their stance are truly remarkable and enjoyable.

Chagwi is one to watch and arguably one of the best emerging contemporary artists in the Kenyan circle.