19-Year-Old Artist Beautifully Merges African Prints With Her Paintings

About a month ago, the paintings of 19-year-old Kenyan artist, Katanu Kay, flooded social media, with everyone who saw them rightfully praising her unique style that incorporated the African cotton fabric, Kitenge, into her art.

While we were just as obsessed as all the publications that quickly wrote about her work, we didn’t want to jump the gun and write an article without hearing what inspired her artistic journey.

So, we at Konbini reached out to her and she was gracious enough to tell us a bit about herself and what inspired her viral creations:

“My name is Katanu Kay and I am 19 years old. I go to Brookhouse school and I’m about to graduate in the next two months.

For my studies, I do a program known as BTEC Art and Design and hope to get a scholarship to a good art university.”

About what inspired her work, Katanu continued:

“I often do portraits of people of colour because it’s something I don’t see around often. My use of kitenge fabrics in my work first started when I was doing an art assignment for my class work.

We were given the scenario: A lodge in masaai mara would like you, the artist, to design wall hangings for the lobby. So, I thought to myself, ‘lions are animals often associated with african culture and so are kitenge fabrics.’

I then merged the two and saw that it was amazing – and everyone seemed to like the idea. Afterwards I moved on to mixing kitenge with other paintings.”

You can check out the rest of Katanu’s work on her Instagram.