Kenya artist Phoebe Ouma
Artist fashioning African stories W
elcome to the elegant
none of those images featured
world of Phoebe Ouma.
women of a skin tone that
The Kenyan artist’s
matched her own.
drawings and paintings of lithe,
Never without a pencil in her
willowy women sashaying through
hand in her youth, the 23-year-old
stylised but recognisably African
only started sharing her work online
scenes were influenced by a child-
just over a year ago (check out her
hood love of fashion magazines
Instagram account phoebe_ouma),
and a realisation in adulthood that
but the response has been huge and overwhelmingly positive with
Artist
Phoebe Ouma
international media and a number of big-name brands wanting to work with her. The marketing and fashion design graduate has ambitions to turn her sketches into a fashion line of her own, but until then she is keen to carry on telling African stories as an artist. Paa caught up with Ouma recently and here’s what we learned.
She still has the fashion magazine that inspired her aged nine… “My mum bought me my first magazine in the summer of 2005, we were at Walmart [Ouma’s family moved to the US when she was four]. I just loved the girl on the cover, I didn’t really care for the stories inside. It was a visual feast for my eyes. It was a bridal magazine. I still have it up to this very day. I moved back to Kenya in the fall that year and reread that magazine for years. I didn’t own another magazine for a really long time until I moved closer to Nairobi and my cousin bought me a second-hand Vogue from a flea market. I think I liked how it was a combination of so many creative ideas. I continually discovered something new whenever I read it.”
It took a school friend to make her realise all her early work featured white women… “I used to have a box of coloured pencils, about 12 in total. I had this peach one and I’d colour all of my girls in that tone. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I called it ‘skin colour’ looking back. A classmate in high school ???
???
asked why all my models were “white women”. I didn’t have an answer, I had to look at myself and why this was the way I saw things.
8
Paa Tanzania
