Painting Malawi was fun because I once had a colleague from Malawi and he told me all about the rolling blue mountains and fields of coffee they are famous for. His family were coffee farmers and he picked coffee as a boy until the Wellcome Trust gave him a scholarship to pursue academia in the UK. The coffee farmers in Malawi barely make 20 cents per kilogram of coffee which is outrageous when you consider the price of whole bean coffee in north America can be closer to 40 dollars for a kilogram, and if you try to calculate how much profit a chain like Tim Hortons makes off a kilo of coffee it must be in the hundreds of dollars. Trying to control the price is difficult because even if a wholesaler in Malawi is paid better by the purchasers, the savings are not passed along to the farmers. We had the idea to import the coffee, as it turns out there are no special regulations to import coffee, however, Malawi is landlocked and the closest shipping port would be across to the East coast of Africa. You can stuff as much coffee as you want into your luggage, it would just be an expensive flight! So in the end our coffee business idea never took off, and shortly after, terrible floods and climate change has made agriculture very challenging in Malawi.
The painting of course shows coffee berries growing on the plant... the berries are about the size of an olive, I saw some in real life down in Brazil. After picking the berries, they are dried into raw coffee beans which are a pale greyish-green, and then roasted into the more familiar brown colours. There are three parts to the painting, the background has some typical rolling blue-grey hills, the middle ground is a wet-in-wet depiction of rows of coffee trees, and the foreground shows a close-up of the coffee trees and berries. The foreground colours were inspired by internet photos, I recognized a mix of white, yellow, chartreuse, green, dark green, and near black. The berries were alternatively red and green. Acacia trees scattered across the landscape are a reminder of what was once there before the coffee plantations.
World Inspired Landscapes: Malawi, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, February 2024
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