Photos © Deborah Ross

NYC Artist Deborah Ross has a mission – to alert the world to the diminishing wildlife and forests via art and publications. She started her career as a freelance artist for the New York Times and the New Yorker in the ’80s. Now she is one of America’s leading wildlife artists whose work has appeared in zoos, botanical gardens, and aquariums across the United States. She travels to Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to study and draw portraits of the animals.

In 2014, through the help of Joel Njonjo, Lale’enok education outreach coordinator, Ross introduced painting lessons to three different schools in the South Rift. The schools that started painting lessons are: Olkiramatian Primary School, Patterson Secondary School and Oloika Primary School. Students learned how to paint trees, birds, wild animals and aspects of their community. These workshops benefit students in the following ways:

• Provide students with a new medium to express themselves
• Enable students to realize and develop their talents
• Encourage students to look at and interpret their environment in new ways
• Connect generations and captures indigenous knowledge
• Facilitate the local students to publish a painted guide book of the local natural resources within Olkiramatian and Shompole group ranches

Lale’enok’s Education Outreach Program aims to continue the painting lessons and perhaps extend them to more schools in the South Rift.

In 2011, Deborah Ross worked with Siranga Naimando to teach children at Il Polei Elementary School how to paint and document local plants and animals. This workshop resulted in a beautiful booklet of watercolor paintings of traditional Maasai medicinal plants – Olcani, An Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Plants of Kenya. The children’s paintings have also been exhibited throughout Kenya and in the U.S. as a travelling exhibit.