By Andrew Mulenga
(First published in the Bulletin & Record Magazine, Zambia in 2013)
A week before the much hyped 20th UNWTO (2013)
general assembly artists and craftsmen – both government and self-sponsored – from
all across the country thronged Livingstone and worked around the clock anticipating
the estimated 5,000 (five thousand) delegates between the twin venues of Victoria
Falls Town in Zimbabwe and Livingstone in Zambia to disembark from aeroplanes
with sack loads of money to buy every trinket that they had to offer.
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| Bernard Kopeka, Don't Worry Be Happy, 2013 |
However, not everyone was excited at the rumoured prospects.
Bernard Kopeka, a 49-year-old artist who is one of five that run the
Mosi-Oa-Tunya Art Centre could not be bothered by neither the panic nor
hysteria brought about by this international event, for him, it was business as
usual.
“Yes I am looking forward to the UNWTO, but what I
know is that we have been artists all along even before the UNWTO we were
artists. Yes maybe they (delegates and tourists) will buy our work but the idea
is just to work as we usually do, if we get sales then that will be a bonus,”
says Kopeka as he applies some final coats of PVA house paint to the portrait
of an elephant. He uses this kind of paint because unlike the professional
paints used by contemporary artists, it is inexpensive and also easier to come
by. Of course this does make his work lower in price, not to say that the
influential American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock used house paints straight
from the tin but his works cost a fortune even before his death, but such is
the irony of art.
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| Bernard Kopeka, 30 years of marriage, 2013 |
Kopeka paints on large format, stretched canvases
making his works that average two metres in height visible from the main road, the
Mosi-Oa-Tunya highway, these along with some anatomically inaccurate sculptures
– that are so unattractive one wishes there was a law against such art – easily
catch the eyes of passers-by, luring them into the art centre.
Nevertheless, Kopeka is not responsible for the unsightly
statues; it is one of the four friends with whom he runs the centre. He is a
painter through and through having picked up the trade from a cousin as a young
boy in his home village in Mpulungu District in the early 1970s just before he
dropped out of school in Grade 7. In his early days, he started out drawing
cartoon strips on any paper he could lay his hands on but later developed his
skill into painting when he migrated to the Copperbelt.
“In 1987 I left the village and went to Ndola, there I found an artist
who started coaching me in Chifubu Township near Fibobe Primary School, that’s when
I met Mr Rodgers Mushinki who was an artist with ZCBC departmental stores,” he
explains.
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| Bernard Kopeka, Akalindula, 2013 |
Kopeka would work under Mushinki’s apprenticeship for
the next five years until the road beckoned once again and he decided to migrate
to Zambia’s tourist capital in 1992 after a lot of encouragement from folks who
saw his work and advised him that Livingstone is where the money is because of
the many art and crafts collecting tourists that visit the city.
But when he got to Livingstone, the beginning was
not as smooth as he anticipated. Sales were slow and the fact that he married
shortly after demanded for a larger income compelling him to seek employment as
a ‘Chigayo Boy’ or hammer mill
operator.
However, Kopeka did not last long at the hammer
mill, his creative vocation continued to call and he found himself quitting
work to take up painting as a full time occupation once again. This time he was
even able to make his former monthly earnings in two days.
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| The open studio of Mosi-oa-tunya art centre in Livingstone |
“Ever since I got married there is nothing else that
I do. It is just art, sometimes I don’t sell anything for a month and we end up
doing some sign writing jobs here and
there, or even the small wall hangings keep us going because they only cost K50
(fifty Kwacha),” explains the artist who now has four children, the first born
being an eighteen year old.
He openly cherishes the support that he now gets
from his wife who has set up a small cross boarder trading business that allows
her to operate a market stall whenever she returns from Zimbabwe to order goods.
But, although in 1992 Kopeka spent time learning new
techniques with the acclaimed painter Vincent Maonde who was running an art
club at the Livingstone Museum at the time, Kopeka’s work is still considered art populaire (folk art) as the
Congolese would call it.
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| Mr Kopeka uses water-based PVA paints |
Not only because it is sold like a commodity in the
open air which qualifies it to be called Jua
Kali (hot sun) as the Swahilis will say, referring to the place where it is
manufactured but because of the seemingly repetitive and almost identical
subject matter the work possesses.
Artists such as Maonde with their Evelyn Hone
training in the 1970’s and further exposure in the United Kingdom and the
United States practice contemporary art in the western idiom, producing what is
often termed as “high art” because it is sold mainly in galleries and on
commission.
“I have come to learn in my years as an artist, that
even the environment in which we sell our art determines the final price of our
work,” says Kopeka “Someone will look around our ‘gallery’ and say ‘no reduce
the price, I can’t buy it for this price’, even when he likes the work,” his
large paintings go for anything between K1,000 (one thousand kwacha) to K2,000
(two thousand kwacha).
As the UNWTO drew to a close, sales at the Mosi-Oa-Tunya
Art Centre were still very low but Kopeka could not be bothered, he was still
in the jovial spirit that is reflected in the colourful outbursts reflected in
the caricatures of carefree, dancing villagers in his paintings with aptly
titled labels as Don’t Worry Be Happy
and Good Times. It is business as
usual.
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| Bernard Kopeka, Good Times II, 2013 |
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| Mosi-Oa-Tunya Art Centre in Livingstone |