25-YEAR-OLD visual artist, Bruce Sakindi Tuyishime is living his dream by using art to connect with his surroundings. Known by his artist name Blue.tyshe, the artist lives out visual art to connect with himself, his creator as well as the things and people around him. “It’s always a good thing to have a place where you go to forget everything and regenerate yourself. Being a visual artist connects me with my creator and everyone around me as well as myself. It helps me to live day by day with something to share with everyone who comes in my surroundings,” he said. The graduate Creative Design at the University of Rwanda (UR) revealed that he started drawing when he was four, adding that when he grew up, he kept doing so because he realised that he was doing it better than anything else. However, as years passed, he found that he needed to enhance his skills and in 2012, he joined Nyundo School of Art. Currently, visual art and creative design are his professions and he is grateful for that. “There are things that you do and feel like you are really alive when you bring them into existence. When you finish an artwork, you feel like, this is what I am and I have to push it forward,” he said. Since the day he started his career, Tuyishime has crafted artworks for people in Sudan and Europe. He is also a poet and he noted that poetry is an art of words and visual art is the same art in pictures with lines and colours, describing that their difference is just the medium of expression which makes them easy for him to combine. “The main idea of my art is to share the good that I have in me so that I can impact someone’s life positively. So, the two forms of art work hand in hand,” he said. Tuyishime noted that art is a sector that is growing in Rwanda and hence seeing the young generation trying something new makes him see a better future in them since that comes with a competition and a platform to learn and teach. So far, he earns from visual art and it makes him feel like he can handle responsibilities because he is producing something people value. Talking about his challenges, he said that in the visual art industry some elders want young artists to work under their visions and influence their brain to see things how they want, which Tuyishime said can be dangerous because an artist is someone with a third eye that can see things other people cannot see and so his art has to be genuine. However, he plans to lead his art in the gaps that are not yet filled in the industry and produces more quality work with detailed creativity. He can be found on Instagram as Blue.tyshe IG or twitter as Bruce_tyshe.
