Market day at Red Hill by Patrick Kinuthia
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 24 September 2018)
Patrick
Kinuthia may be best known for his colorful portraits of beautiful African
women. His women are all distinctive for their elegance, youth and apparent
poise, gentility and grace that derives no doubt from their assurance that Patrick
has painted them with an African Mona Lisa in mind.
It could be
that most of his women are figments of his fertile imagination. But even if
they are, their imaginary vitality veritably pours forth from his portraits such
that one can easily assume they actually have blood running through their
veins.
Yet however
popular Kinuthia’s portraits are among local art collectors, he’s chosen to
focus on landscape painting in his latest one-man exhibition which just opened
last weekend at Polka Dot Gallery in Karen and running through 16 October.
Either way, Kinuthia
has a vibrant sense of organic Kenyan colours. His landscapes are especially
fine reflections of his keen ability to capture nuances in shades of green, be
they shaped as leafy trees, grassy fields, tea plantations or even heaps of
deep green cabbages stacked high in some rural market place.
Kinuthia’s
secret, he says, is his love of the light that’s exceptionally bright in equatorial
Kenya (when it’s not rainy season and not the sort of Nairobi winter that we
locals have had to endure in recent times). His is a love that enables him to
capture the sheen of Karen stable horses (which appear in his current show) as
well as the shimmering turquoise blue hues that ripple along the Lamu coast.
Kinuthia
mainly paints with acrylics (since they dry much faster than oils). But he also
uses charcoal to shade and outline and generate the chiaroscuro shadows that
enhance the mood and feeling of his landscapes, including his trees, rocks,
ridges and rivulets.
Kinuthia has
few street scenes in this show, apart from the empty dirt roads he’s found in
Malindi, Kagwe in Kiambu and even off the beaten path in Muthaiga. But there’s
one that stands out; it’s in Shela where four little boys are on the road but
standing strategically in the shadow of over-reaching tree boughs. The shadow
serves as their refuge as the sun looks set at high noon and it seems to be a scorching
hot day.
In the
seminal book, ‘Visual Voices’ by Susan Wakhungu Githuku, Kinuthia explains that
he loves to travel and loved learning photography at Kenya Polytechnic. That
love of travel is most apparent in this show (which is obliquely entitled ‘Aspects’)
since his semi-impressionist landscapes range all the way from Lamu and Shela
village to Lake Nakuru and Crater Lake. He’s even taken time to paint Malinda
(both in water colors and acrylics), Muthaiga and Mau Narok.
Yet Kinuthia’s
visions of Kenya are ephemeral, given the rate of change taking place in the
country currently. One hates to imagine that the pastoral-like scenes that he
captures in broad sweeping brush strokes may soon by history. But that’s what
happened to earlier landscape artists like Constable, Gainsborough and Turner,
so one can assume that Kinuthia’s paintings could soon reflect a bygone time.
Nonetheless,
the artist is happy to paint what he sees in his own way right now. The surprising
thing about the man is that for all his popularity, the prices of his works are
still relatively low, even affordable to middle class Kenyans.
Kinuthia
says he likes to keep his prices low so that people can afford them. And if in
future, the value of his art accrues, he says that’s all the better for his
art-loving clients.
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