(POSTED 18 FEBRUARY 2019)
Anne Gichuku
(aka bissu_art on Instagram) is one of our next generation Kenyan artists who
can fairly describe herself as being truly ‘self taught.’ Or perhaps more
accurately, you could call her ‘YouTube taught’ since she’s learned all she
knows about digital art (which is her medium of expression) through YouTube
tutorials.
Her
exhibition of digital art currently on until 24th February at Alliance
Francaise is evidence that Anne is proficient in her chosen field of
expression. ‘A girl like me’, the title of her first-ever show, is dedicated to
young ‘girls’ like herself. The exhibition of 30 digital works on canvas is
filled with images of girls who are black, fun, free spirited and unpredictable.
There’s only one guy in her show and he is drawn inside a fruity ice popsycle
that a girl three times his size is getting set to lick the life out of!
Otherwise,
her girls come in all sizes, shapes and activities. Some are beautiful,
others have TV sets for heads, while
others are ‘aliens’ coming from outer space, although one alien girl who didn’t
make it into the show is green and coming ‘out of the ground’, says Ms Gichuku.
“That’s because she’s already here among us.”
Her aliens
girls tend to have a third eye and hair that is either turquoise blue, pink, purple,
green or white. It doesn’t matter to her. But as far as she’s concerned, they’re
all black girls even if they’re from outer space.
‘I love
drawing girls and girls who are black since we are always marginalized and this
is my chance to turn the tide,” says Anne who’s quite fearless about her
feminist cause.
What I find
fascinating is the fact that no digital artist on the local scene inspired her
to develop her artistic skills in the IT field. But she did discover some women
digital artists online and sought to buy them. “But as they would have come
from overseas, the shipping would have been expensive,’ she says. So rather
than forget this new-found interest, she decided she ought to create digital
art of her own.
That’s how
she discovered programs like Photoshop and Painttool SAI, IT programs that
after discovering their potential for use in creating digital art.
But Anne is
actually an artist who’s quite modest about her own capabilities as an ‘analog
artist’, meaning an artist who can draw lovely imagery with paper and pen. But
after she’s drawn the basic image that she wants to develop, she scans it and
then completes the artwork with photoshop and painttool.
Placing most
of her art on her Instagram account, Anne says she also likes digital art for
an economical aspect. Going to shops and buying art materials can be extremely
expensive, she says. But once she’s bought those essential programs, she feels
there’s no end to her creative capacities.
Anne even
posts short videos on the web that illustrate the way her computer, armed with
yet another IT program, can retrace her artistic steps that led to her
development of a specific piece.
“After I
complete a work, I transform it into a PDF and then take it to a printer off
River Road that takes my painting and prints them on canvas,” says Anne who
found this particular printer just walking around Nairobi’s back-streets till
she found this ‘reasonably priced printer’.
Anne admits
there’s nothing really deep in her digital art. “I originally made my digital
art for myself. But then I realized that somebody else might like it too. That’s
when I decided to sell some of it and also have an exhibition of mine.
Anne just
started doing digital art in 2017, but she’s already won one of the Sondeka
2018 awards in the ‘Digital Art’ category. 2017 is also the year she graduated
from Daystar University with a major not in art but in music
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