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Malawian artist, RyanArt
By Munyal Markus Manunyi
Making caricatures of people may look offensive or funny but to the young Malawian artist, Bryan Harrison, popularly known as RyanArt, it’s a means of earning livelihood. The 31-year-old artist told You & Literature Today that people contact and pay him to draw and caricature them, while he charges them some tokens.
Harrison said: “Funny drawing to promote your music or business, I charge $23 only, you’ll be mentioned and tagged in a post. While funny drawing and posting with no tags, I charge $12 only.
“But I started drawing people’s pictures funny as a way of getting awareness to people about my talent as an artist.
“Sometimes I randomly take celebrities’ or my fans’ pictures and draw them in a funny way, and when it finds the owners, they get surprised and laugh over how funny it looks. No one has ever overreacted to my comics just because I emphasize the humour in it.
“At times, people send their pictures for me to draw them in funny ways like I do, and I charge them fairly as compared with my normal portrait charges. Because, besides making fun with people’s pictures I also draw normal portraits.”
Harrison said he likes to joke so much, until he started seeing himself manifesting his jokes in his artworks.
According to him, his journey into the art world began when he was six years old, even before he enrolled in primary school.
He explained that he inherited the talent from his late father who was a great artist, adding that it’s his father that motivated him into drawing.
The young artist therefore described artwork as “a paying profession, especially when you meet the right people or the clients who really value art, and when you meet them, they really appreciate it warmly, though it’s not common to find such people in our land.
“On the other hand, as an artist I can generalise that we face more challenges, such as people not recognizing art as our profession. Like I said, there are only a few that value our profession.
“Currently, art is my profession. I do painting and drawing, T-shirt printing, signwriting, designing, photography videography, etc” he said.
“I’m yet to see the best moments ahead of me, as I see now a lot of people are getting interested in my funny portraits.”
Harrison advised upcoming artists to keep working hard on their talent, explaining that “Behind every success there are challenges to be solved.”
The artist also highlighted his plans of venturing into comic books in the near future to help manage people’s stress as a means of entertainment.
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