SUNDAY NATION
SUNDAY, May 10, 2015
Bertiers Mbatia: Gifted artist who breathes life into metal
STORY by Margaretta wa Gacheru (see below)
Growing up, Joseph ‘Bertiers’ Mbatia used to be
known as a cheeky trouble maker, a boy who barely made it through school
because he discovered his creative calling at a very early age.
Fortunately,
he had a few teachers who appreciated his artistic talent and nurtured
his obvious potential by giving him coloured pencils, paper and
occasionally even paints.
Otherwise,
he never meant to be defiant. He just knew he loved to draw and got
inspired by everything around him, from the lions on Simba Unga and
Simba Chai packets to Safari Rally cars to wall paintings he’d see
outside the butcheries, bars and beauty salons painted by the renowned
“bar artist” — the late DBC Ringo Arts.
“At
home, I’d be beaten by my mum whenever she caught me drawing instead of
doing my homework, and at school I had one headmistress (Wanjiku) who
used to pinch my ears every time she found me drawing in class,” says
Mbatia.
But the beatings didn’t deter
him. Instead, he even found inspiration and even humour in the pain.
“After she’d let go of my ears, I’d go straight back to drawing only
then I’d make fun of her pinching me.”
Ever
the humourist who could make fun of the most painful personal
experiences, Mbatia recalls how he even got the name “Bertiers” as a
sort of joke.
“Finding a nickname for
yourself was what all teenage boys at my (Mutu-ini High) school did, so
I just played around with names until I came up with Bertiers, which
many people tell me sounds French.”
Ironically,
his name would come in handy years later when he won his first major
award given as a collaborative prize by both French and German Cultural
Institutes in 2006. “They were commemorating 50 years since the two
countries officially made peace (after World War 2)”, he recalls.
The
prize included a grand tour of the two European countries where he
visited major art galleries, museums and artists’ studies.
“The
same year, I was number eight out of the top 10 award-winning artists
at Dak’Art in Senegal,” he says, noting the accolade was meant to
include trips to Dakar and southern France where he’d been given a
two-month art residence.
Later that
year, Mbatia would become an even more seasoned globe-trotter,
travelling first to Scandinavia where he and his art would be part of
the “Africa Now” mobile art exhibition that went from Denmark to Norway
and Finland.
But in between he made it to the US where he had another successful exhibition in Seattle, Washington.
The
trip was especially significant to Mbatia since his paintings had been
regularly exhibited and sold out of a Los Angeles gallery ever since he
met American art dealer Ernie Wolfe outside the Wasafiri Hotel in
Dagoretti back in the early 1980s.
“The
Wasafiri was actually where I had my first exhibition,” says Mbatia,
who’d started hanging his storytelling-style of paintings up at the
popular tea “joint” soon after he’d completed a three-year graphic
design course at the YMCA Craft Training Centre.
MY MENTOR
“I
used to paint on old metallic plates after I’d scrap off the original
Malaraquin ads; then I’d hang them anonymously and sit in a corner at
the hotel and listen to what people had to say about them,” he
remembers, indirectly confirming that his style of visual storytelling
has elicited curiosity and public commentaries ever since he began
taking his art into the public domain.
He’d
always assumed the public didn’t know who the artist was; but one day
as he was coming home from a day’s work at Chibuku (where he’d been
employed as a graphic designer in 1985), he saw a huge crowd near the
hotel.
“Once I got near, people
started shouting, ‘There he is, there’s the guy.’ Then I saw a tall
white man emerge from the crowd, stretch out his hand to me and
introduce himself.”
His name was
Ernie Wolfe, the Californian art dealer who bought up all of Mbatia’s
metal-plate paintings that day and launched a relationship that (despite
having its ups and downs) would last up to this day.
Wolfe
is the first serious art collector to appreciate Mbatia’s brilliance
and begin commissioning him to create series of paintings, after which
the artist would ship them to the US.
“By
today’s standards, people might say he paid me peanuts, but at the time
I was grateful to have that steady income,” the artist tells Lifestyle.
“My wife always reminds me that that is what enabled us to buy our land
(near Dagoretti) and build our first (mabati] house).”
The
other thing that Wolfe gave to Bertiers was advice on what to paint.
“He liked my style of painting, but as I was relating to local topics
that struck a chord among Kenyans, he asked me to broaden my perspective
so that my art could relate to a more international audience.”
Advising
Bertiers to start reading Newsweek and Time magazine as one of the ways
he could broaden his painterly perspective, the artist credits Wolfe
for suggesting he paint about global topics, everything from the first
Iraq War to the OJ Simpson and Monica Lewinski sagas to specific events
unfolding in Europe and Asia.
“For a time, I knew more about international events than local ones,” he said.
Nonetheless,
despite his painting primarily for an American clientele, Mbatia’s art
and sign-drawing skills were still in great demand locally. “I was still
painting (wall or bar art) in butcheries and salons, much like DBC
Ringo had done.”
It was the “bar art”
that one German (working for GTZ) saw and subsequently sought out
Mbatia, encouraging him to hold an exhibition at Goethe Institute. “Ast
Guido is the one who helped me get my first show at Goethe in 1992,”
says the artist.
Today, Mbatia’s art
can be seen all over Kenya, in parts of Africa (Senegal and Tanzania) as
well as internationally. Most recently his paintings have been on
display at Alliance Francaise, Nairobi National Museum and the Nairobi
Art Fair where his booth won the prize for being the second
best-attended.
But, ultimately,
Mbatia’s amazingly intricate scrap metal sculptures may be the art that
he will be best remembered for. Like his realist paintings, his
sculptures also capture iconic images straight out of Kenyan everyday
life. And as with his paintings, he injects heavy doses of humour into
his works.
The extraordinary fact
about his scrap-metal characters is that he only learned how to weld a
few years back. “The man who came to weld the windows of our (new stone)
house inspired me to learn to do it myself,” he said. Now he’s teaching
young men and women who he recruits to join his youth group, DARTS,
which is short for Discovering Artistic Talents.
“In
the same way that my talents were discovered and nurtured by others, I
want to do the same for young Kenyans who have artistic talent but need
to be discovered,” Mbatia says.
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