Today, his portraits have been shipped around the continent and around the world, including China. They cost between Sh40,000 and Sh50,000 with some having higher costs depending on the size.
Hand Bags
Soi has also made a name for himself through the ‘Michael Soi Handbag’. The canvas handbags bear the faces of some of the girls who have featured on Soi’s portraits.
“The girls on the portraits and the handbags are very pretty. Is it intentional?” I ask him.
“Yes, they definitely are, although a majority of them have very nasty behavior,” he says.
The uptake of the handbag was initially slow. According to Soi, he would paint ten bags per week when he first started doing them.
That was until Oscar Award Winner and Kenya’s national sweetheart Lupita Nyong’o bought a handbag from his collection and posted its photo on Instagram, which changed the fate of his collection forever.
“I was on my way to Italy. After I landed, I logged into my Instagram account and saw that I had accumulated more than 4,000 followers after Lupita posted the photo. I’m eternally grateful to her,” he says.
The photo of the handbag has close to 50,000 ‘likes’ to date on Lupita’s Instagram account. On the other hand, Soi moved from making ten bags in a week to ten in a day due to the demand that followed the photo that went viral.
Today, Soi says that the African-American market in the United States is his biggest. According to the artist, they seem to relate well with the handbag and appreciate the art on it.
Nairobi is his second biggest market. This has been facilitated by the middle class women who have been appreciating art for quite some time.
“The biggest problem however is when I find women carrying the handbag. Truth is, the handbag is not meant to function as a handbag, instead, it is a piece of art which deserves to be framed and hanged in a lady’s favourite place.”
The handbag costs Sh4,000.
Reception of art in Kenya
The artist is also ready and willing to discuss the state of art in Kenya. According to Soi, art and artists hardly get the appreciation they deserve. For instance, when the Ministry of Education was tasked to remove some subjects from the curriculum, Art was the first casualty.
