Out of Africa: Artist Paints Memories of Ethiopia

When Girmay Tesfay fled the famine and war of his native Ethiopia seven years ago, his memories of the starkly beautiful country were preserved in a few black-and-white photographs.

Now 32 and living in Hollywood, Tesfay has used those snapshots as the inspiration for a collection of paintings depicting East African life that are on display through May 17 in the Sight & Sound Gallery at Cal State Northridge.

It is fitting that Tesfay, having had to rely on his imagination for the color that his photos lacked, has filled his paintings with vivid hues, from the blood red of a warrior’s traditional headdress to the lavender sky behind a desert camel.

Tesfay hopes the rich colors capture the idyllic life of his childhood, before civil war and drought put Ethiopia on the nightly news.

“I want people to get to know how Africa really looks like, its people and its culture,” Tesfay said. “It’s not only us knowing about the other world, the other world has to know about us.”

Many of his 27 paintings, done in bright oils and watercolors, depict grazing animals, outdoor markets, religious ceremonies, thatched huts, rural landscapes, musicians and women grinding grain.

“His work is serene,” said the show’s organizer, Deborah McDuff, who works in CSUN’s Pan-African Studies Department. “In this busy world we live in, looking at his paintings is very calming.”

A spokesman for the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles sees his work in much the same light.

“He’s not trying to play on the famine or that type of thing,” said Mercedes Walker-Hutchins, manager of the museum gift shop, which sells Tesfay’s prints. “He wants to show the beauty of the country. It’s his way of sharing what he’s very proud of . . . of keeping the vision alive.”

Tesfay was raised in the southwestern town of Jima, the coffee-growing capital of Ethiopia.

His artistic career was launched as a teen-ager when he won first prize in a national art competition sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency in commemoration of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Later, he opened a studio and earned a living by painting portraits of local dignitaries and sketching scenes of African life for tourists.

During that time, civil unrest began to tear the country apart. Marxists seized control of the government in 1974 and began mass killings.

The war directly threatened Tesfay’s family. His father, who died recently, was an army general and governor of a northern Ethiopian state that still is fighting with Ethiopia’s socialist government in an effort to secede from the nation of 45 million.

“I was always wanting to come to the United States,” Tesfay said. “This was a place where you could learn. But when things got worse, it was also a place where there was peace.”

With the help of two brothers already in Los Angeles, Tesfay left Ethiopia in 1982. His experience as an accountant in a government-sponsored livestock project in Addis Ababa helped him land a job in the business office of Fashion Club Inc., the Los Angeles clothing company that markets several popular brands of sportswear, including Ton Sur Ton.

Although he has worked his way up to be the personal accountant to the firm’s president, Tesfay always finds time for his art. His Hollywood apartment doubles as a studio. UNESCO recently asked him to illustrate some educational materials. And he looks forward to another show at the Hotel Ibis in Carson next month.

One of his favorite paintings is of a handsome woman with flowing black hair who is dressed in a traditional Ethiopian gown. The portrait is titled “Konjit,” the name of his longtime girlfriend who left Ethiopia and joined him several years ago.

“I painted this to express the beauty of the people we have there,” he said with a wide grin.