Peter Elungat

Peter Elungat is one of East Africa’s most distinctive and widely collected contemporary painters, celebrated internationally for his haunting, spiritually charged figurative works. Self-taught yet visually and technically sophisticated, he paints in a style reminiscent of the Grand Masters of 16th-century art, a remarkable achievement for an artist whose only formal exposure to art came through community studios and workshops. His work is held in corporate and private collections across Kenya, Europe, North America, Asia, and beyond.

Early Life

Peter Elungat was born in Teso, Western Kenya in 1978, the eighth of twelve children. All the children, he recalls, had some creative interest or the other, everyone did something with their hands. His older brother acted as his mentor, encouraging him to sketch scenes of village life and the surrounding landscape. Elungat followed in his brother’s footsteps, drawing constantly with his brother’s discarded paper and drawing tools. His early drawings depicted daily life, rural landscapes, and traditional homesteads.

Education & Training

Elungat received his primary education and attended secondary school for two years before dropping out in 1997 due to financial difficulties. An uncle introduced him to the artists at the National Museum in Nairobi, where artists operated from a studio provided by the Museum. Elungat joined the studio and his life as a professional artist began. Michael, one of the resident artists, took a liking to him and immediately took the young Elungat under his wing.

He joined the Kuona Trust Art Studio in 1997 and attended many instructional workshops, which remain his only formal training in art. His colour and compositional skills, his use of light and shadow and of paint and canvas, are all largely self-taught.

Elungat would eventually move to a studio at Kobo Trust, after he fell in love with an open office space at the Kobo Safari premises and was given it for free to use as a studio. He painted there for the next seven years, and after he left it became home to other artists, evolving into an artistic hub.

Artistic Practice & The Angelina Figure

Elungat works primarily in oil on canvas, typically on a large scale. His practice is defined by a recurring female subject. In his work, women, and his muse Angelina in particular, symbolise purity and spiritual receptivity. The shimmering golden backgrounds and disregard for anatomical proportions in his paintings lend the work a mystical, medieval quality. His choice of palette carries symbolic significance: blue and black represent hardship and suffering, whilst brown and white represent rebirth.

Angelina is, in fact, Elungat’s alter ego, the projection of his inner state rendered in oil on canvas, a device for exploring the self without the inhibition of self-consciousness. Elungat has since evolved from the singular Angelina into a wider ensemble of female avatars.

His subjects have no tribe, no race, no nationality, they are universal yet African; both at once, African unconstrained by whatever cages the world invents.

Beyond painting, Elungat is himself an adept flautist and singer, and his deep relationship with music pervades his canvases, figures are frequently depicted with instruments, their bodies echoing musical forms.