Voi painter with a Midas touch

A few years ago when Andrew Omenda Were a.k.a Madolla was asked by a traffic police officer to travel with him to Malindi to go and make paintings for the officer’s bar in Malindi, little did he know that a window of vast opportunity was about to open for him.The painter says he made very impressive artwork of different wildlife species on the walls of the bar, which aroused the interest of tourists who visited the pub.

“Tourists liked my paintings of wildlife which they said were lifelike and quite attractive. From there my artwork opened more opportunities in Malindi and I had to stay longer than I had initially planned,” says the painter.He says after completing the artwork at the pub some tourists asked him to make oil paintings for them largely on wildlife and landscapes.

“I was very lucky because at that time another Italian investor by the name Angelo who loved my artwork very much gave me free art materials, including oil paints, solvents and canvas,” recalls Madolla exuberantly. “I set out to make canvas paintings of different wildlife species especially the big five — lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo, and elephant. In total I made 25 canvas paintings.”

Hopper was born in Nyack, New York to a strict Baptist family. He is said to have developed a talent in drawing at the age of five, as well as a love of French and Russian culture. Encouraged by his parents, the young artist explored the media of pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor and oil, depicting scenes of nature as well as creating his own humorous political cartoons. Around the age of 18, he moved from his conservative home on the Hudson River to study at the New York Institute of Art Design, where he began working with live models and painting in the style of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

In 1905, Hopper began working for an advertising agency to earn money, designing magazine covers despite his dislike for illustrations. It was during this time that he was able to travel to Europe to study artists like Rembrandt and the Impressionists. Briefly inspired by the soft palettes of the French painters, Hopper eventually settled into the dark color scheme he would become known for, painting urban scenes of street crowds and cafes through his signature shadowy lens. After returning from abroad, Hopper reluctantly continued to work in illustrations, and it wasn't until 1913 that he was able to sell his first painting, "Sailing," at the Armory Show in New York.

Hopper turned to etching urban scenes of Paris and New York while living in Greenwich Village. In 1923, he met his future wife, Josephine Nivison, the woman who would serve as his manager, oil painting reproduction, and lifelong partner. From there, his career began to rise, showing newly created oil paintings and prints throughout New York.

After a brief period of inactivity during the late 1940s, Hopper continued to create works throughout the next two decades, focusing on quintessential American themes like gas stations, motels, railroads and restaurants. Hopper lived through a series of artistic movements in the United States, but his style remained consistent, incorporating saturated colors and heightened contrasts to create dark, cinematic moods straight out of film noir. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Mendes frequently cited him as an influence.

On May 15th, 1967, Hopper passed away in his studio near Washington Square in New York City, shortly followed by his devoted wife ten months later. His body of work was donated to the Whitney Museum of American Art, with some famous pieces finding permanent homes in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Works by Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Gauguin and Lucian Freud were stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal gallery in 2012. Three Romanian suspects were arrested in January, but the paintings have not been found. Instead, one of the suspect’s mothers told the police that she had burned the stolen works in a wood-burning stove in an attempt to free her son from prosecution due to lack of evidence.

These works, which include Waterloo Bridge, London, painted by Monet in 1901, are now among hundreds of valuable missing paintings. Once a painting has been stolen, it can stay underground or undiscovered for years or even decades, making the crime even harder to solve, as leads become less tangible and ownership is passed down through generations.

While she won't name many of her clients, Ray does reveal that DJ Bruno Brookes and chef Marco Pierre White rank among them. She was once commissioned to do a copy of Van Gogh's Vase with Gladioli for Dame Edna Everage. Gladioli-accessorising miserabilist Morrissey would probably like a copy of that, too, but he's out of luck: Ray doesn't do duplicates, as a matter of principle.

But isn't this forgery? Isn't Ray's whole oeuvre that of a cynical charlatan? "I'm not a forger," she says, arguing that she's different from, say, the notorious cockney forger Tom Keating, who avoided jail even after admitting to painting 2,000 fakes of old masters. On the back of each copy, Ray signs her name. Real forgers don't do that. That said, she tells me some of her clients have passed off her copies as the real thing, if not to make money then to show off to dinner guests. One household name (whose identity I can't reveal) loves to boast about his Claude Monet – when it's really his Susie Ray. But isn't Ray facilitating such grubby behaviour? "A lot of famous people pass off my copies as original," she says. "That's up to them."

You could have been a lot richer, I add, had you followed Keating's path. "In jail more likely," she retorts. "Tom Keating wasn't a very good forger. The only reason he got away with it is that he was copying in an era when the reproductions weren't very good. People didn't know how unlike the originals his versions were. I don't have that luxury."

I've spent two hours trying to replicate Manet's Asparagus, the simplest impressionist masterpiece Ray could find for me to copy. The original, in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is a cute art-world joke: in 1880, Manet sold collector Charles Ephrussi A Bunch of Asparagus for 800 francs. Ephrussi sent him 1,000 francs, so Manet painted this extra stalk and sent it off with a note: "There was one missing from your bunch."

My shambles contrasts sharply with the technical mastery of the canvas hanging on the wall behind me: Ray's copy of a painting from Monet's series Cabane des douaniers, effet d'après-midi. "The title sounds better in French," she says. "Customs shack in the afternoon doesn't have quite the same ring." I wonder how much a Monet copy would shift for, but this customs shack's not for sale.

I'm working from three coloured prints Ray has sourced, each one tonally very different from the other, with one cropping out the asparagus altogether. Ray has done a rough sketch and helps me mix some paints. I've never painted in oils before and am on a steep learning curve, but what I'm mostly acquiring is a profound appreciation of Manet. Just look at the illusion of solidity he creates at one end of the spear with just two brushstrokes. Damn him. My version is hopeless. It's starting to look like a seagull.

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