The craft of caricature shaped into a fine art

Before he got a studio at Kuona Trust where he now gets fresh insights from fellow artists every day, Paul Njihia had two main mentors. One was his father, a primary school teacher whose real passion was painting portraits and surrealistic images. The other was the online website www.deviantart.com.

“I discovered the website four years ago while I was still a student at University of Nairobi,” said Njihia who just graduated with a degree in commerce and marketing a year ago.

Admitting he didn’t learn much about marketing at university, the self-taught artist claims he spent more time surfing the internet and drawing portraits and paintings of friends. But it was the discovery on YouTube of the caricatures drawn by the American artist Mac Garcia that set Njihia on the artistic path that he’s currently on.

Claiming he still paints portraits when called upon to do so, the 24 year old artist can be more frequently seen sketching caricatures at music festivals, like the recent Rift Valley one in Naivasha, or fairs like the one Kuona recently organized at the Sarit Centre, the five-day Nairobi Art Fair.

For Njihia, doing caricatures regularly is a relatively new activity for him.

“I only started in August of last year after I saw Mac Garcia on YouTube drawing caricatures in something like three minutes flat,” he recalled.

Since then he’s done lots of reading on the subject of caricatures. What he’s discovered is that he’s not the only one who feels challenged to balance the realism associated with portraiture and the interpretive exaggeration that creates the caricature.

Sensitivity

Admitting there’s a bit of psychology that goes into creating a caricature Njihia says he feels compelled to be sensitive to the feelings of his subjects when he draws. For instance, he created a caricature of the One Off Gallery curator Carol Lees during the Nairobi Art Fair which she liked but also felt he’d been a bit too polite in his drawing.

“A caricature should exaggerate certain features of a subject; for instance, he could have accentuated my nose or my ears but instead he didn’t,” she said.

Njihia admits he doesn’t like to offend his clients since some people can get quite upset if the caricature touches a special sensitivity. For instance, he says plump people don’t particularly like their excess weight to be accentuated in his art; young girls want to look cute; but the most sensitive subject that he’s drawn so far are babies since the mothers can get seriously upset if theirs doesn’t look as they would wish.

“Lots of factors are involved in the way I do caricatures,” says Njihia. He takes everything into consideration, he adds, including the gender, age, size and even the sense of humour of his prospective client.

And since he’s committed to sketching his subjects with the same sort of lightning speed that Mac Garcia has managed to do, Njihia has to size up the psyche as well as the physique of his subject quickly. More often than not, he’s cautious when it comes to exaggerating specific features of clients, just as Carol Lees observed.

But one exception he recently made was in drawing the Kuona driver. Fortunately the driver is his personal friend so he didn’t take offense but his caricature elicited lots of jokes and jovial jabs from fellow artists at Kuona.

Asked if he was ever malicious when he drew, Njihia was reticent to reply. But he did show me one drawing he had done of the Tanzanian rapper Diamond which wasn’t flattering in the least.

His drawing was based on a newspaper photograph which already presented the musician as scruffy haired and somewhat shaggy, but Njihia clearly didn’t mind accentuating the distasteful features of the pop celebrity.

At home as a way of relaxing, the artist says he often picks up a newspaper or magazine and draws caricatures of personalities he admires like the late Wangari Maathai and the African American guitarist Jimmy Hendrix.

But the kind of drawing that Njihia apparently likes most is the one where he can sketch in a matter of minutes using both black and coloured pencils.

He still paints portraits and even reproduces some from photographs, but for him it’s also much more pain-staking work which is one reason why his portraits are pricier than his three-minute caricatures which to my mind are not only a better bargain. They also reflect a greater mastery on the artist’s part even as they provide a lot of pleasure for the subjects of his caricatures.