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African Art Paintings Artist Wycliffe Chagwi

Wycliff Chagwi is a character immersed in obvious talent. He is a self taught artist who gets his ideas for subjects from photographs and life that he sees in his country of Kenya on a day to day basis. He paints mostly rural children that he sees in the villages of Kenya.

Chagwi loves his country and is very loyal to it, expressing this loyalty and love through the subjects of his original paintings. Like any Kenyan, he has strong command of the Kiswahili language, but struggles with the secondary language of English.                                                                          Chagwi says that his role as an artist, which started as a teenager, has developed from being a struggling painter in the late 1990's to now where he considers it a "lifetime job." He says that in Kenya, citizens of the country "don't appreciate arts." A challenge he and all artists face is that "the price of the art materials are too high" thus diluting some of the potential talent artists can express by having the right materials. Chagwi keeps at his artwork because he believes in his art and is one of the few artists in Kenya who has enough customers so that he can make a living out of painting. He is not intending to stop. He encourages other African artists to also continue so that they will one day be a success.

 The quality of his work and the subjects in their stance that he paints are truly remarkable and enjoyable.