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When grief becomes art: The painter who puts raw feelings on canvas

Africa News News African September 24, 2026 · Comments off

A single piece can take him 200 hours or more to finish, sometimes stretching into a full month once he counts all the time spent simply brainstorming ideas. His studio is just a corner of his home.

Canvases stand on wooden stands around the room, some bare, some half painted, some finished and leaning quietly against the wall. Paint sits open on a small shelf, and older pieces hang on the walls. He does not force ideas to come.

“I don’t have specific processes. I feel inspired,” he says. Only once the feeling is clear does he move to the canvas, working, as he puts it, purely from instinct.

Leonard Amimo is 38 years old and signs his work as Lee Amimo. He calls his style ethereal wheels.

“Ethereal basically means out of this world,” he says, and the wheels are the small spiralling circles he paints, moving in threes. “The wheels symbolise flow of energy, vibration, what lies underneath. I just paint feelings,” he says.

Narrowing a feeling

Lee believes his years as a writer shaped the way he now builds a painting, narrowing a feeling the same way he once narrowed a topic on the page. Once the feeling is clear in his head, the rest of the work just follows it wherever it leads.

That is exactly how one of his best-known pieces came to be. It is called ‘Nairobi’, and it shows a tall building on Kimathi Street, the kind that has stood in the city for years. It came from his own journey from Kisumu into Nairobi, the first time he saw buildings that tall.

The woman in the piece wears green, and a butterfly is drawn toward her. Around her are rippling circles repeating in threes.

“It’s like a ripple. Rippling out,” he says, tying the pattern back to something larger. “Vibration is all energy,” he adds, describing how nothing in nature ever truly sits still.

Look closely at any of his paintings and you will notice that almost every figure he paints is a woman. “They are the doorway to this world. We come through a woman,” he says, comparing women to flowers, since “flowers make everything beautiful.”

He enjoys dressing his painted women well, since, “I like to see beauty in things.”

None of this is decoration for its own sake. When someone stands in front of his work, he wants them to feel specific things.

“Calm. Hope. Desire to keep moving,” he says, along with a quiet reminder that the past and the future are tied together, even as daily life pulls people toward money and comparison.

CHEMA, an artwork by artist Leonard Amimo, created using acrylics and permanent pen on canvas, photographed at his home in Ruaka on September 17, 2026.

Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group

Lee’s paintings seem to arrive in people’s lives at the right moment. One piece, called ‘Zahara’ was bought by someone who had just moved to Malindi to start a business in the aquamarine industry and had settled into a building carrying the same name. He had no idea about any of that when he painted it.

Another piece, called ‘Ada’ was bought by a woman who had just lost her mother, also named Ada, and the painted face reminded her of her mother when she was young.

He likens these moments to strangers who somehow understand each other instantly, even joking about the science behind it.

“Are you aware of quantum entanglement?” he asks before explaining that some people simply arrive already connected. “I print and make works of art from instinct. This is not something you can be taught.”

Pricing the art

Work like this does not come quickly. A single piece can take him between one week and one month to finish. That shapes how he prices his work.

“I price it based on my experience, rarity, time I take, and, yeah, you know, my instincts. For art, there’s no fixed price point.” His first painting sold for Sh15,500. Since then, he has sold work for as much as Sh450,000, and he expects further growth.

“I can sell a piece for over Sh1 million, why not?” Lee sometimes lets a piece go for less than its worth if the story moves him enough, believing that, “what you’re giving is what you get out.”

Long before any of that, before the studio and the stands and the finished canvases, there was a much smaller room, and a boy who did not yet know that art would be the only thing left of his family. His father died when he was only four years old, and the only thing he left behind was art.

His mother, who worked in medicine but was creative in her own way, died when he was eight. Art became the one thread tying him to his parents. “I feel like, for lack of a better term, I’m continuing my father’s legacy,” he says.

That thread carried him through school, earning him scholarships and awards, and pulled him toward painters, sculptors, carpenters, and musicians who shaped how he saw the world.

Nairobi City Hopper, an artwork by artist Leonard Amimo, created using acrylics and permanent pen on canvas, photographed at his home in Ruaka on September 17, 2026.

Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group

He studied art and design at the University of Nairobi, graduating in 2011 with a focus on illustration. It should have been a straight road from there into painting, but after school, he ran into the same wall many young Kenyans face.

“The first thing they ask you is the experience you have. And then, the starting salary can’t sustain.”

So he turned to writing instead, a path he followed for about 10 years. Writing, he says, lets him travel the world in his mind and understand “the philosophies of life, religion,” seeing existence through other people’s eyes.

Then, in 2022, art pulled him back. He began managing an artist named Steve Nyaga and spent long hours in the studio watching him work. The arrangement reminded him of what he could still do himself. He picked paper back up and began doodling again.

“I was at a really deep place, and the style just came to me.”

By 2024, he had returned to practice seriously, refining what he calls a fresh approach.

Lee refuses to give up on people who claim they do not care about art. “It is my mission to make them appreciate art,” he says, adding that we are ourselves artworks since we were created in a unique way.

None of this journey has been easy.

“I started painting on a piece of paper. I couldn’t afford canvas,” he says. There is no fund or organisation to turn to for support, and no separate studio either. He works from home, where family life often competes with his art for time and space.

His advice to anyone with ambitions to become a painter? “Start where you are. Plant the seed, give it time and watch it grow. Just believe.”

Art, for him, has never simply been a career. “For me it is a vacation, and I’m just on this river flowing where it needs to take me.”

Lee has tried other paths before and none of them ever felt whole the way this does. He believes there is always something waiting on the other side of hardship.

“As long as you do it from an honest place,” he says, “You will never sleep hungry.”

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