THE PANDEMIC disrupted people’s lives, some lost their jobs, and some lost their business, while others slid into depression. Gilbert Uwezo, a 28-year old artist, howevr after losing his job as a store keeper, decided to turn back to his painting skills for survival. Uwezo used to paint but never took it serious. Little did he know, that his talent would bring food to his table in times like this. “I had a simple job but was doing art at the same time, so when the pandemic hit and most employees stopped working, things started getting really hard. We were put into our first lockdown and that is when I started thinking of actually turning my talent into something that will feed me, since I lost my job,” Uwezo shared. The artist used his savings to buy materials and started creating artworks with the sole purpose of a profit out of them. Uwezo started drawing at a young age, doing it for fun and with no intention of earning from it. In 2010 he learned that art could be a profession after seeing how much profit his artistic friends made out it. In 2018, he started out his journey in art, making it his profession, he never took classes for drawing or painting, he learned by observing his fellow artist. He started by doing portraits for people. From then on, he started loving art and practicing it but without selling any of his artworks. He later moved away from drawing a bit after getting a job. “Because my salary was not satisfying, I started thinking of doing art as a side hustle to earn more, I saw how much my friends achieved from their craft and I decided to start making art a business, and honestly the money I was getting from it was good but still, it was not a serious business because I had that job too,” he said. Even though he made art his profession, he still didn’t rely on it much, since he had a job. This was until the first lockdown last year “I never thought doing art would actually bring a big profit, people started recognizing my work and Istarted getting a lot of requests from people to do art for them, support from my friends which was encouraging,” he adds. Uwezo said that he has now decided to focus on art as his profession, he encourages young artists who lost hope in themselves to be confident in what they can do and seek opportunities that can come out of their talent.
