So authentic that they push you onto the streets of Kenya to better observe its reality, so real that you lose yourself in the thousands of details, so well painted that you admire a talented and original artist and you want one of his works in your home.
These are the street characters of Anthony Wajohi, a brilliant painter from Nairobi who narrates a world that is not just his, but that of anyone who lives in or visits Kenya and approaches it without preconceptions or superficiality.
Explaining Wanjohi's art and creativity without recounting his life would be like having only the grinded metal template on which he paints his portraits of Nairobi's street people.
People often think of figurative artists, those who make a living from painting, sculpture or photography, as the chosen ones, wealthy people who have been able to choose to cultivate their talent because they have had the financial opportunity.
In Kenya, this is not always the case and Anthony Wanjohi is the clearest demonstration of this. Of his 38 years of age, which still makes him a young artist, only for the last four or five has he finally been able to make a living from his work, although he realised at an early age, around the age of 9, that the only chance he had to change his life was to paint.


                                      DIFFICULT TEENAGE YEARS
 

‘At school, I realised I had a natural talent for portraits,’ Wanjohi recounts. ‘In drawing lessons, my classmates traced pictures from books, I reproduced them identically freehand. It was an epiphany, but as I got on in my teenage years, it was also difficult to live with: in my family, no one had ever had this inclination, for relatives and friends, the painter is just the one who makes shop signs or advertising posters’.
Wanjohi has a difficult youth between Nairobi and the towns of Muranga, where his mother's relatives live, and Nakuru, where his father has made a second family: his parents have separated Anthony lives with his mother in Nairobi who works hard to support him and his sister. He is big and bulky compared to his peers, and has a restless and quarrelsome nature.
‘I often found myself bullying my classmates, and my mother would send me to her parents, then they too would resent me and I would try to stay with my father, who had in the meantime had three more children.
The only constant in this vagabond life was drawing. With any technique: from little pieces of chalk left by the teachers on the board, to paint left over from painters redoing false ceilings. After a bit of excessive rambling, when I was 16, I decided to insulate myself in a wooden shack and started drawing in chalk all over the walls, with pictures I copied from old newspapers I found lying around. When I got back to Nairobi, I found some paints lying around, I immediately thought of going back to the shack and colouring everything I had drawn. That's how I started to realise that painting would be my path’.
Wanjohi would like to make a living from his talent and does nothing but draw, paint, practise. He stacks dozens of plywood sheets full of faces, all taken from magazines and newspapers and reproduced better and better.
 

                                       TALENT AND SURVIVAL
 

But once he finishes high school, he also has to deal with survival. His mother, who runs a shop in Nairobi selling gas cylinders in the working-class neighbourhood of Donholm, cannot enrol him in university. He struggles with any job, from bricklayer to carpenter, to scrape together two coins and be able to dream of one day living on art alone.
‘When you tell someone that you want to live the life as a painter, they take you for an eternal child and in any case they do not consider it a job with which you can make a living, furnish a house, start a family. I worked hard thinking only of breaking through as an artist. I painted portrait after portrait of famous people, from Obama to Bob Marley and so on, trying to sell them. Once I used all my savings to buy advertising space in a shopping mall. I waited for someone to call me for a portrait. Nothing. I went back to my mother and started delivering gas cylinders'.

In the meantime, a nice circle of artists has sprung up in Nairobi: they hang out at the Godown Centre, help and advise each other. Wanjohi approaches it with admiration and a great desire to learn. He has found a second-hand computer, but cannot yet afford an internet subscription. With a memory stick, he goes to the internet point and downloads thousands of images to reproduce. He falls in love with Leonardo and Raphael and more work is born.
‘Eventually there was no more room to keep them in the house or to work. I was jumping from one house to another, hoping to one day have my own space to work in. The turning point came when I visited Kuona Collective Centre, another artists' self-managed space in the city. Two painters, Fred Abuga and Dennis Muraguri, advised me to switch from paint on plywood to acrylics and oil on canvas. Oil on canvas? I didn't even know what that was...but I took the plunge'.
Expenses increased, for paints and canvas, and so did the space to paint. Wanjohi resumes working as a bricklayer, breaks his back to be able to afford to make a living as an artist again. He works, paints, finds time to frequent the creative circles of the capital. He gets into this whirlwind routine until finally, in 2017, he manages to get a small space at Kuona to exhibit his portraits.
Kuona is also frequented by many foreign collectors and enthusiasts, as well as affluent Kenyans and curious tourists passing through.
‘People would stop by my space and smile. They did not expect to see portraits especially of Caucasians, of celebrities. They were surely expecting something else, something more local, more real. But I already had reality inside me, I had lived on the street, done menial jobs, fought for my survival. The fact is that in the first six months I was not selling anything, and I was already afraid that I would have to go back to being a bricklayer for the umpteenth time. Fortunately I was doing small jobs for other artists, which allowed me to get by.  But the new works I was preparing were different: I had fallen in love with Duhrer and Lucas Cranach. It was from the latter that, in preparing a painting for a group exhibition that was to depict an everyday urban scene in Nairobi, among matatu, vendors and various humanity, I decided to put a self-portrait of myself in the foreground. After all, I could easily have been there in that scene’.
 

                                 THE STREET ILLUMINATION


Here was the illumination that changed Wanjohi's life: to portray the people on the street as himself.
After selling that work and earning his first real money as an artist, Wanjohi chose the street: street vendors of everything, people making ends meet, hustling, making up their lives every day. He spasmodically starts photographing them and faithfully reproduces them or directly prints the black and white photos on all kinds of materials, then colours and reinvents them. A bit Bansky off the walls, a bit Andy Warhol. But this is Wanjohi, one of the truest and most original artists around, whose rise will only be stopped by the pandemic and the temporary closure of the world. He will try, because Wanjohi's energy and craftsmanship is irrepressible and during the immobility of the Covid period, he will spend time studying and experimenting.
‘Having chosen my subjects and how to use them, after colouring and cutting them out, I had to find the right material on which to recreate them. One day I tried with a half-rusted piece of metal. I cut out the silhouette of a man with a hammer and cold chisel, like a blacksmith of yesteryear. I liked the result. I decided to buy sheets of metal, starting with the cheapest, then watched tutorials on youtube on how to use the welder and grinder. I had finally found my original way’.
As soon as the world opened up again, Wanjohi sold his first two metal templates and from there, continuing to invest in materials and photographing the street people of his city, he never stopped. Today, he is one of the most highly-regarded and certainly among the most communicative and real artists around in Nairobi.
In his characters are the reality, the contradictions and the spirit of survival of an entire generation of Kenyans. They are the protagonists of the popular comedy of this country, a people of ghosts to whom Wanjohi gives colour, personality and meaning. The same that the visionary talent has given to his life.

To visit Anthony Wanjohi's exhibition space, one has to go to the Kuona Artist Collective, on Likoni Road in Nairobi. Until 22 September, you can see his works in the ‘Sex & the City’ exhibition along with those of Michael Soi and Thom Ogonga. Admission is free, every day.