Ordinary Lives - The Weganda Review

George W. Kyeyune, an associate professor of sculpture as well as history of African art at Makerere University, has been at work since the 1990s. His studio is an office at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts. There, in the occasional solitude of his meagre space, Kyeyune attends to students and others when he isn’t creating works such as the masterpieces in this portfolio.

Sculpture is Kyeyune’s forte, and he paints like a sculptor: public works he created or co-designed range from The Stride, a copper monument to the 2007 Commonwealth summit in Kampala, to a bronze monument to Saint Andrea Kaggwa at the Catholic basilica in Munyonyo. Those works speak for themselves.TWR is highlighting his work with oil on canvas, an oeuvre that marks him as a very important artist.

Kyeyune’s work is significant for many reasons, but perhaps the most striking is his ability, like a literary novelist, to evoke a sense of time and place in imagery that can capture a distinct reality of ordinary life. A faithful chronicler of the thrills and troubles of people in rural and urban settings, it can seem as though he excavates his figures from canvases rather than create them with paint. His impasto technique – thick layers of paint usually applied with a palette knife – is inimitable. As far as we know, no one paints like Kyeyune in Uganda today, at least not in the charming expressionist style of which he has long been a master.

Kyeyune told TWR that he has always been interested in the chaos of peri-urban informality and how people overcome it. “There’s a stampede here, there’s a scuffle here, here someone is trying to eke a living,” he said. “I want to portray that with dignity but also with seriousness, and also highlighting the fact that actually people are struggling. But they are also surviving and, in spite of all the challenges, they seem to be happy.”

Kyeyune’s work also mesmerizes for the way he depicts women. They are often in commanding poses or situations where their moves are possibly going to be decisive. Sometimes they loom large over the men. And they are usually desirable with their buxom bodies and mysterious looks. There’s something Kyeyune does with the female form that’s difficult to articulate: a certain je ne sais quoi, a kind of animal spirit that lifts off the canvas. “The curves, the volumes, the succulence in them, I think, I find that very enticing, if you like, but also recognize God’s creation,” he said. “God put so much time into this female body, and no wonder God made a woman last, and whatever was lacking in a man he put in the woman’s body.”

Kyeyune, 61, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from Makerere University in 1985. After earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India, he started teaching at Makerere in 1990. He earned his doctorate in art history at SOAS, University of London, in 1999. He has received numerous fellowships, including a 2013 Fulbright at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

TWR considers Kyeyune Uganda’s great living artist, an assertion we don’t make lightly and which will be elucidated in a forthcoming essay. His works are units of significant cultural and aesthetic value that would be hoarded by a national museum of art, if we had one. Kyeyune himself makes no such claims about his gift, for he is of humble disposition and his works do not command the hefty prices they ought to. This is partly because he devotes most of his time to teaching. He has to be pestered by gallerists to produce new work.

In a way, Kyeyune is living the typical life cycle of the truly great artist: often underappreciated, occasionally celebrated in his lifetime, and then posthumously immortalized in the inevitable rush to take a fresh look at his forgotten genius. But Kyeyune has his ardent collectors, connoisseurs who know that one day they will be asked, even begged, to share this artist’s work with the world. To behold a Kyeyune picture for the first time, like the oil painting titled Abaana ba Kintu that is this issue’s cover art, is to face something like a miracle: the vibrant palette, the human figures that emerge as if sculpted from the side of a mountain, and the key details in bodily interaction that specify the vital push of existence. These people are alive, individually and as a crowd, inhabiting a cosmos all of their own. ▪