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Page 1 of 2  By Angela Lu | UCLA DAILY BRUIN
Several weeks ago, Ethiopian painter Qes Adamu Tesfaw flew on an airplane for the very first time in his life at the age of 75. It would have been great, except that the flight from Ethiopia to Germany and then on to LAX was 27 hours long, and Tesfaw had a fear of flying.
His trip to the United Sates, however, was a dream-like opportunity that he couldn't pass up.
"He was very excited about it," said Ray Silverman, who has worked with Tesfaw over the last 12 years. "It's something that he could have only dreamed about because most Ethiopians don't have an opportunity like that."
It was his first time traveling to another country, but it was what he was traveling for that was probably the bigger dream than traveling itself. He was attending the opening-week festivities of the very first exhibit dedicated solely to his artwork, "Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw," which will run at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History until Sept. 18, and which Silverman curated.
The mural-making workshop, which the Fowler Museum held in its second-floor studio, was itself a first-time experience for Tesfaw. He spent the majority of the three-hour session observing 21 complete strangers paint in one of his charcoal-outlined drawings.
For the first couple of hours, he stood, at a comfortable distance, silently observing the guests paint while scratching his white, closely cropped beard. He watched so closely that it almost seemed like he was one of the museum visitors viewing one of his paintings in the gallery downstairs.
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| “Clergymen” and “Zar” (below) are two of Qes Adamu Tesfaw’s paintings on exhibit at the UCLA Fowler Museum: “Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw.” |
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Later, he rested his feet by sitting at the back of the classroom-sized studio, and chatted in Amharic with the other Ethiopian adults while continuing to watch the young paint.
Tesfaw himself began painting as a young boy in rural Ethiopia. The son of a priest, he was fascinated by the paintings he saw in church in his hometown of Bichena. He would create art on virtually any available material, including fragments of ceramics and broken bones softened with an axe and eventually learned how to paint while studying for the priesthood.
It was with his ordination that Tesfaw received the honorific title "Qes." However, he later left the priesthood in order to pursue painting full-time. Although he no longer lives the life of a priest, much of Tesfaw's paintings still depict various religious themes and tell the stories of various saints.
The tradition of painting in the Eastern Orthodox church goes back 1500 years and is a tradition that is evident in Tesfaw's paintings through the depiction of religious subject matter, but also through the heavy use of patterns, the emphasis placed on eyes and, most importantly, tiny inscriptions in the ancient ecclesiastical language of Ge'ez that serve as narrative notes and identify the major figures in the mural paintings.
Throughout the history of the church, Silverman said these inscriptions have been used by priests as references in their teachings. Even today in rural areas of Ethiopia where churchgoers are often illiterate, priests and deacons will stand in front of a painting and teach the churchgoers the history of their faith through the narrative paintings.
With his own works, Tesfaw continues this tradition of art as a teaching aid, although they are meant more to teach Ethiopian history and culture rather than religion. At the mural-making workshop, Tesfaw said through a translator that his ultimate hope for his paintings is that they educate people about the different faces of Ethiopia, mostly its history and culture.
It seems that with every chance he gets, Tesfaw pursues this goal. During the hour prior to the mural-making workshop, Tesfaw sat alone in the studio with his translator, UCLA political science graduate student Shimelis Bonsa, working on another painting. With a bottle of black paint in his left hand, and a brush in his right, he spoke quietly to Shimelis about what he was painting.
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The mural he was working on is one of his fused image paintings, with three separate events occurring in the same mural. On the left, Jesus is depicted curing the sick and blind, at the middle are clergy members conducting holy communion, and on the right is Jesus washing the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper.
"What I found most interesting about him is how invested he is in the stories he paints, and that when you ask him to talk about the quality of his painting, he doesn't talk about the formal qualities of the painting, he doesn't talk about the aesthetic issues, he talks about the content," Silverman said. "That's the whole reason why they're being produced."
Tesfaw had also spent part of the prior week talking through a translator with hundreds of school children about Ethiopia's history and culture. Religion is just one of three thematic categories Tesfaw's paintings encompass. He also paints scenes of Ethiopian history and Ethiopian culture. In fact, the Fowler exhibit is organized so that each of the three rooms of the exhibit focuses on one thematic category. The first room features Tesfaw's religious-themed paintings, the second features those paintings depicting Ethiopian history and the third is comprised of those depicting everyday Ethiopian life.
Some historical events depicted in the paintings of the second room include King Solomon seducing the Queen of Sheba, the Battle of Adwa and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie receiving Queen Elizabeth as a guest.
The third room contains paintings depicting Ethiopian ceremonies, games, the buying and selling of sheep in a marketplace and the AIDS epidemic in "We Must Unite In Prayer to Fight HIV/AIDS," in which AIDS is shown as Satan, skinny and red with a skin disease.
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Arts & Culture 
