Mercy Kagia
is a rare sort of visual chronicler. She’s the kind that is so charmed by the ordinary
everyday lives of regular people that her greatest delight seems to be in documenting
their activities and accoutrement with pen and ink on plain paper.
More often
than not, Mercy works quietly, surreptitiously in unobtrusive spaces. Sometimes
she draws on paper made from rice. Other times she apparently works on paper
specially made for water color.
Occasionally,
she’ll use a brush to add a dab or two of color as she did when painting the
‘clean water’ tanker an aquatic shade of blue. Or when she gave her Kisumu
Municipal Market a leafy green vine. Or touched the helmets of two motorcycle
taxi drivers with a sunny yellow hue.
But more
often than not, it would seem it’s the dark, thin lines, shapely swirling
curves and contours of all that she sees in her own daily journeys that seem to
interest Mercy the most.
In her one-woman
exhibition that’s currently on at Polka Dot Gallery, the artist is to be found
“Taking My Pen for a Walk.”
So while her
pen is Mercy’s primary means of expression, it’s her walking all around Kenya,
chronicling what she’s seen, that’s the biggest bonus in what she’s brought to
this enchanting exhibition.
But it’s not
only people and their daily practices that have appealed to Mercy in this show.
Certainly she’s still intrigued with boda boda taxi drivers and mama mbogas
selling their wares in the open air, be they fruits, vegetables or mitumba
clothes. Nudes in tasteful poses also occupy one wall at Polka Dot, reflecting
Mercy’s time teaching Life Drawing over the last many months.
But what’s
equally intriguing about her ‘walking pen’ this time round is that she’s
branched out spatially and drawn all the way from Diani Beach to Lake Naivasha
and the Aberdares to Lake Victoria. Along the way, she’s drawn everything from
whispering palms to water tankers, cattle obstructing traffic outside The Hub
and camels trekking gracefully on Diani beach.
With her
landscapes, she’s taken slightly more interest in water color as when she
painting the Indian Ocean and the Galu? Beach at Diani. But personally, I’m
happier with her detailed pen and ink drawings.
I
particularly like Mercy’s Zebra series, including the singular young ones (who
look like they’re grazing in high heels), the duo, trio and family drawings of
these elegant and graceful creatures whose natural beauty Mercy captures in
fine black lines.
But the fact
that she features several colorful still life’s in her show, including fresh
fruits (like apple, pear, bananas and pawpaw) and veggies (garlic and onion) is
also a treat for their simplicity, fidelity to natural colors and look, as if
they’d be good enough to eat.
Mercy also
has a series focused on vehicles: the retired Chevrolet taxi, old-fashioned
Volkswagon Beatle, water tanker, soil-moving crain and even a lorry
transporting equipment being used to repair a transformer.
But as I have
a special affinity for motorcycle taxis, I’m particularly partial to Mercy’s snapshot
drawing of a family of four snuggling close to their boda boda driver. In real life,
they might look like an accident waiting to happen. But the taxi man is also
providing a life-affirming service to this family (the smallest might have been
two) who otherwise would probably have had to walk long distances in the heat
of the mid-day.
Mercy would
have had to make a quick sketch of that image while the family was still in
sight. But even so, she’s never at a loss for capturing the delicate details
that make subtle statements about the characters in her drawings.
I don’t know
if Mercy has ever been compared to Norman Rockwell, the great American artist
and illustrator of ordinary everyday life among the people and places he walked
with in his daily affairs.
Mercy might
not find it a compliment to be compared to Rockwell. But he had a knack for
drawing humble scenes that spoke louder than verbal chatter could do to reveal
the secret lives of everyday people in his place and time.
To me, Mercy
has a similar knack. So to have the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what she
and her pen have witnessed in Kenya right now is a good reason to get to Polka
Dot Gallery (across from the Hub in Karen) and meet Mercy through her art.
No comments:
Post a Comment