By Margaretta
wa Gacheru (posted 29 October 2019)
Mercy Kagia
takes us around the world, not in 80 days as Jules Verne aimed to do. It’s more
like four years (with stops in between).
But it was well
worth waiting for the global reportage of this amazing visual artist whose watercolor
paintings, sketchbooks and illustrations are currently at One Off Gallery
through November 24th.
Kagia is one
of those rare painters who humbly calls herself an illustrator, in part because
she got her doctorate in Illustration at Kingston University in UK.
What makes
her rarer still is that she’s an artist who visually documents virtually everywhere
she goes, be it to a tea shop, a sea port or a temple, cathedral or grand old
opera house.
Ever
equipped with her portable box of paints, brushes, pens, ink and tiny container
filled with water, Kagia can also rarely miss carrying at least two of her
sketchbooks at a time.
The one
other item (apart from a minimal stash of clothes) she’s needed during her four-year
trek around the world was a backpack that left her hands free to paint and draw
whenever she was moved to do so.
The ‘Travel
Drawings’ that she’s displayed at One Off are only a fraction of all that she
drew during her trips around Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Nonetheless, they confirm Kagia’s genius and genuine joy in capturing both the
mundane and magnificent moments that she sees. Hers is a fervor and freshness
of perspective that she shares with the students she’s currently teaching in Augsburg,
Germany.
It was back
in 2015 that she went to Myanmar, a country that clearly captured her
imagination. Yet this show won’t allow us to see all her artistic impressions
of the terrain since the majority of illustrations included in this show were
originally drawn in one of her precious sketchbooks.
“I chose
just a few from each sketchbook to scan and include here,” says Dr Kagia who
has been keeping all her sketchbooks since 2002. Admitting she now has hundreds
of books which are not for sale, it’s still worth coming to see those few illustrations
from her books since her travels take us all the way from the ‘Giraffe-Necked
woman’ in Bagan, Myanmar to sights in Japan and South Korea back to Germany,
Austria, Spain and Ferrara, Italy where she attended a Sketchbook Festival that
brought together artists with similar habits as hers.
Because she
is also teaching, Mercy didn’t take her extensive trek around Latin America
until late in 2018 through mid-January this year.
”Because I was
traveling for three months, I could only carry one sketchbook so I had to limit
my drawing to one a day,” says Mercy who went all the way from Columbia, Peru
and Chile to Argentina. “We even went by cargo boat up the Amazon [River] from
Columbia to Peru,” she adds, clearly having relished the adventure.
“I was sorry
I wasn’t able to get to Brazil,” she tells the Brazilian ambassador and his
wife who is also an artist having an exhibition December 1st at the
National Museum. “But I hope to get there next time,” she adds.
One can
hardly doubt that Kagia is likely to get to Latin America again although there will
be many more drawings that she’ll do before she gets back there.
Included in
her ‘Travel Drawings’ is reportage of time she spent in Kenya, although
watercolors like ‘Kisumu Municipal Market’ are only affordable postcards. But that
means even art-lovers with a minimal budget will be able to afford one of Mercy’s
masterpieces, albeit in a minimal form.
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