🎨 Naftal Mageto Momanyi
Visual Artist | Nairobi, Kenya
🪨 “With a lifelong passion for working with stone, I’ve cultivated a language of silent dialogue—one where the stone speaks, and I listen. Each piece invites me to look within, revealing the images held deep inside, waiting to be set free.”
A recent TV appearance by Naftal on Kenya`s GBS TV
Along other academicians who shared to inspire me in varied artistic aspects includes limo Njau,formerly of Kenyatta University Kenya, the late Prof Yusuf Lwanyaga Musoke formerly of Makerere and Da-res-laam Universities in Uganda and Tanzania, prof Dennis Evans, then head of sculpture at the University of Regina, Canada, prof Bob Pouyher, head of the college of Native Indian Arts, University of Regina, and prof of emeritus Bill EPP, formally chairman of school of Visual Art, University of Saskatoon Canada.
Dr, Kamau Wango and Cephas Agbemenu both of Kenyatta University Kenya, as well provided an encouraging environment during my 3 month sculpture demonstration at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2001.
am passionate about developing Kenyan visual arts & am Chairman of the Kenya National Visual Artists Association (KNVAA)
An initiative that enables Kenyan visual artists create a platform to market Kenyan art and cultural products that speaks volumes of Kenya's cultural and artistic traditions.
KNVAA was formed in 2016 to unite all visual artists in Kenya through the establishment of KNVAA county branches countrywide as a forum to address the myriad challenges facing the visual art sector, by engaging National & Country government to establish basic resources to enable visual artists on production level to achieve real economic growth. KNVAA has over 3000 members and branches in over 19 counties.
On the national level, KNVAA has initiated an Art Sector Review Committee that is collecting views and data on the Art industry to present a paper that will enable the National Government, National Assembly, and Country Governments to create proper laws and regulations to support & govern the industry.
am also Chairman of the Kenya Chapter of the ARTerial Network. This was launched at a conference on Goiree Island, Senegal in March 2007 with the theme, Vitalizing African Cultural Assets. The Conference took place against the backdrop of the adoption of UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions; the challenge was to position African artists, creative practice and cultural industries so that they could benefit from the recommendations of the Convention and assert their place on the global stage and in the global creative economy.
Aesthetic is the branch of philosophy that's concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness in the eyes of the observer. Aesthetics also deals with the question on whether such qualities are objectively present in things they appear to qualify or whether they exist only in the mind of the individual; hence, whether objects are perceived by a particular mode, the aesthetic mode, or whether instead the objects have in themselves special qualities_ aesthetic qualities.
Criticism and the psychology of art, although independent desciplines, are related to aesthetics. While the psychology of art is concerned with such elements of the arts as human responses to color, sound, line, form and words in which the emotions condition such responses, criticism on the other hand confines itself to particular works of Art, analysing their structures, meanings and problems, comparing them with other works, and evaluating them.
The core values upon which my sculptures in aesthetic form are founded revolve around the belief that art, religion and philosophy are the bases of highest spiritual development. Beauty in nature is everything that the human spirit finds pleasing and congenial to the exercise of spiritual and intellectual freedom. Certain things in nature can be made more congenial and pleasing by reorganizing them through Art to satisfy aesthetic demands and that aesthetic satisfaction is achieved by contemplating them for their own sake as a means of escaping the painful world of daily experience.
Art confronts the terrors of the universe, and Art can transform any experience into beauty, and by so doing transforms its horrors in such a way that they may be contemplated with enjoyment. It is on this basis that the aesthetic forms in my sculptures, SCREAMS OF A BROKEN GOURD and AGONY OF CLIMATE CHANGE, are conceptualised in such a way defusing tension in the ugliness of a situation to infuse beauty within the physical discharge of horrific expressions.
The power and centrality of beauty in my sculptures resides not only in aesthetic character arranged in a harmonious relationship of parts to whole, but also resides in their ability to radiate sculptural energy that pulls the work's compositional structures together into a comprehensive sum sequence.
he ability to manipulate sculpture materials to express information in multiple sensations confirms to the assertion of opinion that Art is a language, and two types of languages exist: (1) The symbolic, which conveys ideas and information; and (2) The emotive, which expresses, evokes, and excites feelings and attitudes. Art as emotive language, gives order and coherence to experience and attitudes
These factors are important also for their use of psychological techniques in analysing aesthetic reactions alleyed in thematical structures constituting overall artistic expressions in my sculptures.
Art being a medium best suited to examining our own existence and that of earthly surroundings that reflects in our living experience or corresponds with the nature of our own being in the universe, the ability to visualise the invisibles through artistic images clearly affirms to the understanding that Art is a spiritual life of its own nature, and an Artist is just a consecrated custodian of the very artistic spirituality.
The inspiration for my art springs from the compelling desire to communicate my emotional experiences to the people using artistic imaging as a symbolic language through which the information is conveyed based on topical themes.
Sources of my inspiration are as diverse as the artistic techniques in which the sculptures are carved.
The diversity of technical application in my sculptures gives me a peculiar freedom to express my artistic feelings in multiple sensations without limit, and is intended to capture diverse interests of public taste thus disseminate intended information more profoundly.
Even though my sculptures are carved in multiple artistic techniques, the basic bond that unites them in common is the pleasant beauty and the intensity of their emotional contents.
In my approach to beauty, I am largely interested in lines, spaces, and form balance arranged in total co-ordination.
The intensity, flow and location of a line is the basic element of beauty in my sculptural outcome.
Analytical detailing in form and subject contents aimed at emphasizing the dominance of a particular feeling in the physical character of a sculpture becomes crucial aspects of my work plan.
Traces of ancient African attire coined into modern techniques in my sculptures are not for purposes of historical interpretations, but are meant to create an identity rooted in African people as I comparatively explore to identify the root cause of social, political and economic changes currently affecting Africa in particular and the world in general.
However, this does not imply that my art is entirely based on African interpretations, but as an area for a particular focus in a series of topics.
Throughout my 40 plus years in sculpting experience, I have absorbed the tradition of patience, economical and detailed rendering of objective fact.
With a long time passion in handling stone, I have established and nurtured a language of communication through which I passionately talk with stones, as they usher me to see into the inside and free images locked inside them.
have been able to overcome limitations of materials, extracting nuances and refinements that are hidden deep in the materials, and my approach to art has undergone numerous technical transformations as I continue to find suitable ways to visually express the power and energy of a sculpture, as an effective communicative intermediary for the masses.
Most of my sculptures are created as a total nude form. My main intent is to convey a sense of truth and exotic imagination. There is so much I see in a naked sculpture; there is hard truth, intimacy, endurance and of course the expression of the undefined beauty embodied in the curves and crevices. A naked sculpture expresses mortality best. It reveals the hard lines mingled with soft frightful lines so tender engrossed with the human nature desiring to live on.
My commitment in art is not by career or art for business, but it is by a noble call that I sculpt by passion, great dedication, a sense of mission, a will to identify my own destiny with that of sculpture itself, that echoes my ability and enthusiasm to treat the material stone with passion, confidence and humility.
Aligned to Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries, my sculptures are made to radiate and correspond in harmony with the force of gravity. Gravity for me visually contributes to the greater extent of the visual essence of sculptural energy. Through gravitational stability, the forms and proportions of each sculpture, perceived as it rises from the stand, appear to release the sculpture from the pull of the earth.
The essence of gravity of a strong relationship between the form of the object and the ground on which it stands is always central to vital combinations of my work plan.
Materials and structure, volume and space, the unity and proportions of my sculptures do not speak for themselves but articulates a complex and profound sense of our own being in the universe.