How Dale morphed from a philosopher to portrait artist
Beatrice Wanjiku next to her portrait. PHOTO | MARAGARETTA WA GACHERU
Despite his teaching philosophy for more than a decade both in the UK and West Africa, and despite his dropping out of St Martin’s School of Art after just a year, there’s little doubt that Dale Webster was destined to become a professional painter, even an artist’s artist.
He’s taken his time getting round to what any good fortune teller could have foreseen when he first went to one of UK’s best art schools back in the 1970s.
But then he got intrigued with ideas and the theoretical gymnastics that philosophers go through. He studied fine art together with philosophy for several years at Leeds University and at University of California, Berkeley.
While he might have dabbled with painting during those years, once he got out on the job market, he identified as a philosopher and university lecturer.
It’s only when he came to Kenya with his family nearly a decade ago that Dale stopped dabbling and began to take himself seriously as a painter.
Renaissance
His transformation from philosopher to full-time painter is a process that’s still underway. But if one can get to Red Hill Gallery and see his latest exhibition of portraits (which opened last Sunday), you’ll see that Dale was not only destined to be a painter; he also got here just in time to be part of what some have called a ‘renaissance’ in Kenyan art!
Dale has been doing portraiture from the time he picked up a paint brush back in 2007 and had his first Nairobi exhibition at his daughters’ school. “I found the diversity of people living in Nairobi fascinating,” he told BDLife shortly before the opening of his current Red Hill show.
It was that interest in the city’s wide variety of people that led to his having his first public exhibition at Le Rustique Restaurant in Westlands.
His subsequent exhibitions have taken place everywhere from the Ramona Museum, Le Rustique and Village Market to University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
But his shows at Red Hill are undoubtedly the ones most memorable and meaningful, first, because they feature familiar faces, fellow artists who may not be well known to the wider public but who are definitely members of the current community of Kenyan ‘creatives’ who are actively involved in expressing their own artistic initiatives.
Chronicles
The other reason his Red Hill exhibitions are to my mind so significant is because of the historical context in which Kenyans are living right now.
Something creatively cathartic seems to be underway in the local art world. But there are few witnesses to this profound change in the local art scene who are documenting what’s going on. My view is that Dale is one of those few.
In his first exhibition at Red Hill two years ago, he had already begun visually chronicling some of our most prominent Kenyan artists, starting with Peter Elungat, Michael Soi, Thom Ogonga, Maggie Otieno, Patrick Mukabi and Beatrice Wanjiku among others.
In this second show, he continues on what seems to be a quest to visually capture even more Kenyan artists as well as friends of the arts who he’s gotten to know since that first exhibition.
That’s why he’s included everyone from Peterson Kamwathi, Paul Onditi, Gor Soudan and Chelenge van Rampelberg to Jackie Karuti, Jimnah Kimani, Wambui Kamiru, John Kamicha and Richard Kimathi just to name a few of the exceptional Kenyan artists whose portraits are up at Hellmuth and Erica Rossler-Musch’s gallery.
Some critics may ask about the realism of every painting. For instance, James Mbuthia’s struck me as being too stoical compared to the jovial artist that I know. Wambui Kamiru’s portrait is beautiful but a bit too placid to serve as an accurate expression of The Art Space gallerist.
But at the same time, Dale captured a hint of Paul Onditi’s ironic sense of humour in his portrait. And for me, he’s spot on with his visualisation of Zihan, Beatrice and Kamicha as well as many others.
