The grand old matriach of Kenyan art

When Yony Waite is not painting monumental murals depicting the many facets of Maasai culture, including the expansive terrain on which they’ve lived and moved nomadically for who knows how many centuries, she’s either emulating their transient lifestyle, trekking around the world by any and all means, be it bus, boat, motorcycle, matatu or airplane (large or small) or even by horse, outrigger canoe or camel.

It’s a passion she picked up from the time she was 12 and her family moved from Hollywood, where she was born, to an island in the Pacific Ocean called Guam. That passion has compelled her to travel everywhere from Southeast Asia, Scandinavia, the US and South Africa to Central America, Somalia, Sudan, and practically everywhere in between.

Otherwise, one can find Yony working on commissions for clients like the Hilton and Sheraton hotels or the Serena Group, which has sent her all over East Africa — from Entebbe, Ngorongoro and Amboseli to Mombasa Beach, Maasai Mara and Nairobi to transform their lodges and hotels into amazing three-dimensional works of art!

The Serena Amboseli is where she’s painted the monumental murals devoted to the Maasai. You’ll see their bright ochre-colored forms everywhere as you enter the lodge – at the reception desk, in the bar and in all the lounges.

Yet the dining rooms and all 92 guest bedrooms are covered in countless creatures indigenous to Amboseli: from elephants, giraffes, wildebeests, bush babies and a vast variety of birds to carefully observed hippos, cheetah, crocodiles and Thompson’s gazelles. Yony’s love of these creatures is plain from the playful way that she depicted them. “Each room is different and has a different set of animals in it,” she told Saturday Nation.

40 anniversary

It’s practically like a living art museum, but it wasn’t created overnight. Indeed, the lodge itself is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, and Yony has been there off and on practically from the start.

She was actually called by the CEO of a now defunct firm called TPS, Tourist Promotion Services, Dennis Laken, to paint lodges in Uganda. “I made sketches for three lodges, but then suddenly the project was cut short when people began fleeing the country in light of the murderous methods of Idi Amin,” she recalled.

Laken then asked her if she would like to work on a new lodge in Kenya which was still under construction, but she could go on down to Amboseli and get right to work. That was 1973 when the land on which the lodge is still standing was filled with volcanic rock and without trees, unlike today when it’s surrounded by a leafy green forest, thanks to Serena’s successful reforestation program.

Amboseli Serena was the first lodge to be built by the Group (with the Serena Mara coming up almost concurrently), and one that Yony’s been called back to work on periodically ever since. “It’s been every time Serena decided it needs to expand its capacity,” said the lodge’s current manager Herman Mwasaghus, who has witnessed Yony at work over time and marvelled at her apparently effortless and spontaneous style of work.

Indeed, one could say that Serena Amboseli has been an art work in progress for the past 40 years.

But she hasn’t always been doing commissions. Initially, when she first arrived in Kenya in the early 1960s from Somalia, where her father was working as chief engineer for a USAID project based in Mogadishu, she was painting for one-woman art exhibitions held at the New Stanley Hotel.

That is where she first met a fellow artist named Robin Anderson who also exhibited at the New Stanley, and who, like Yony, wanted more space to show her artwork. That is how Gallery Watatu, one of Kenya’s first commercial art galleries, was born in 1968 in what was and still is Nairobi’s central business district.

“We were not out to make money,” said Yony, who worked with several co-directors after Robin and the other co-founder David Hart sold their shares in Watatu, and Yony finally sold hers in 1985 to the German American art dealer named Ruth Schaffner.

Gentleman’s pact

“In fact, Robin and I never did make much money. But what we were more interested in was having a space where we could be assured that our art would be shown,” added Yony, who is responsible for mounting some of the first exhibitions by Kenyan artists in Nairobi. Other artists of the time included Ancent Soi, Louis Mwaniki, Hezbon Owiti, Samwel Wanjau and Jak Katarikawe.

In fact, even after she sold her shares in Watatu, Yony has had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with whoever was in charge at the gallery, be it Ruth, her late husband Adama Diawara, or most recently, Osei Kofi, that she could still bring her latest artworks to the gallery to showcase free of charge.

She’d always check into the gallery every time she came to town to pick up her mail and to stay current on the local arts scene; which is one reason why she is sad that, under Kofi’s management, the Gallery (which was strategically located in Lonrho House) was shut down and its fate left in limbo up to now.

One of Kenya’s most prolific painters, Yony is also a sculptor, muralist, textile/fashion designer and one can even describe her as an interior decorator since she devised all the décor for the Amboseli Serena including the lodge’s logo.

She is also the only artist in the region whose public art is scattered all across East Africa, even as her other paintings, murals, sculptures and tapestries can be found in private collections all over the planet.

She is still the nomad who’d prefer to get on a bus, plane or boat rather than stay close to home — in spite of the fact that she has a lovely old coral-brick Swahili house in Lamu where her Wildebeest Workshop welcomes visitors, especially artists, all year round. She also has a house and gallery on a ranch (owned by her ‘ex’) in Athi River.

More precisely, she is in the process of rebuilding the house and her Wildebeest West Gallery after an inexplicable fire destroyed most of both buildings just over a year ago.

What might have been devastating to other artists is that, just prior to the fire, Yony has assembled most of her wildlife paintings in the gallery since she was about to launch Wildbeeste West with a view to opening the space up to fellow artists to do workshops, mount exhibitions and even hold music concerts at the ranch.

Practically all of those paintings were destroyed along with the gallery and her makuti-roofed house. But rather than grieve or be filled with self-pity at her loss, Yony took off alone to travel by bus and matatu all around the region. She was gone several months, but when she came back, it was as if her soul had been cleansed and she went back to work.

Today, her Athi River gallery and home are almost rebuilt, the gallery practically filled again with art works that she has been painting non-stop since her soulful sojourn. Yet even when the house is complete, Yony won’t quite call the ranch the home in her heart. In fact, she’ll always see herself as a bit of a ‘roadie’ and wanderer who never was keen to settle down on a permanent site.

“There is too much still to see and experience of life for that,” said Yony, who nonetheless has an affinity for Africa, especially Kenya, that she’s felt practically since she first arrived in the early 1960s.

That affinity is part of the reason why Yony became a Kenya citizen more than a decade ago.

In part it also may be because she had a premonition when she first laid her eyes on Lamu that one day she would come back to Kenya (she had just completed University of California, Berkeley) and live in Lamu, which is exactly what she has done.

When she’s not at the ranch watching the giraffe, ostriches or elands outside her front window or trekking somewhere else in the world, she’s in Lamu beside an ocean similar to the one she first encountered at age 12 when she learned quickly to love the life of a traveller, which she does to this day.