THUKU’S STILL IN MOTION AT ONE OFF GALLERY

By Margaretta wa gacheru (posted 30th November 2019)

David Thuku has been on the move from the moment I first met him in 2013.

He had recently formed Brush tu Art Studio together with Boniface Maina and Michael Musyoka, after having worked with them painting theatrical backdrops and home murals with the two before that.
Thuku had already graduated from the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art and won a Langalanga Scholarship, the British-based charitable fund that supported education opportunities for bright but ‘needy’ Kenyan youth. I remember vividly seeing his series on pregnant women and felt at the time, the works might be reflecting the artist’s own potential to give birth to new art forms that he had yet to see  within himself.

Sure enough, Thuku’s art has developed and transformed many times since then. He has worked with a variety of mixed media, not just the painting that the ‘brush’ in ‘Brush tu’ had signified. When he won the competition to design the Kempinski’s new chandelier, I wasn’t surprised to see his colorful dangling rings which he’d carefully knitted together hanging gracefully from the light.

Thuku remained a member of the Brush tu Collective even when he moved his studio from Brush tu first to Kuona Artists Collective and then to the Kobo Trust. He’s still based at Kobo now, but even before One Off Gallery recently made him a new member of its group, he was exhibiting abroad in Paris, London and most recently in South Africa.

Now that he is having his first solo exhibition at One Off as one of the Gallery’s guys, I can see why this show is called ‘Still In Motion’. It’s because Thuku is indeed still gaining new insights, trying out new techniques and coming up with fascinating and fresh ideas.

In his 2018 exhibition at Red Hill Gallery, Thuku’s work was slightly more political than now, illustrating the challenge that consumerism poses in polluting people’s minds. Even then he had begun working with paper-cuts and coming up with thought-provoking art.

His show at One Off seems less political and more of a reflection of ordinary people in their everyday lives. With heads apparently insulated in boxes as they move, his figures seem to be isolated in their own limited cocoons. Thuku himself says the boxes signify something about identity and what people experience in their psyche. But to me, the boxes suggest limitation and confinement to a static worldview. Even though they seem to be in motion and walking across differing terrains, still there is no interaction among his figures. Each one is isolated, which suggests a condition related to an individualism that has few relations with their fellow human beings.

Thuku also creates paper cuts containing empty chairs in them. He suggests the chairs signify expectation of visitors to come. But they could also signify emptiness and a feeling of alone-ness in contrast to the community that people find among family and friends.

Thuku’s collage paper-cuts are clean and refined, but I personally would like to understand their significance in terms of direction. Where are his figures going? Being in-motion for motion’s sake is like creating art for art’s sake. One wants to know the meaning of the work. Otherwise, it’s simply are left with an interesting technique, attractive color combination and so-called ideal body forms in Thuku’s figures. His technique is especially intriguing since he works in layered collage paper-cuts and glazed in acrylics.

We applaud Thuku for exploring and experimenting with new techniques, but still, we wanted to understand more about the significance of his art. It’s probably my inability to see.     

TWO SAHARAN ARTISTS INTERPRET THE DESERT AND THE SKY

BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 30 November 2019)

Vivid memories of the sky and the desert make up the essence of Gravitart’s recent Pop-Up exhibition in Peponi Gardens entitled ‘The Sky Inside You: A Reflection from the Desert’.

Curated by Veronica Paradinas-Duro and Hiroko Iahikawa, and featuring the artworks of El Tayeb Dawelbait and Mostafa Sleem, both are artists whose fondest childhood memories are of their fathers and the ways each of them navigated their everyday lives in the Saharan Desert.

Both artists grew up on the edge of the desert, one from Sudan, the other from Egypt; but each having a father who approached the desert from very different perspectives. El Tayeb’s dad used the stars in a way similar to how ocean-going sailors used to do. Both would navigate their way around their ever-changing environs allowing the stars to be their guides. Thus, the theme of his portion of ‘The sky inside you’ relates to the sky and especially to the moon which itself played a central role on his father’s traveling and then finding his way home.

Mostafa’s father, on the other hand, was a Sufi mystic who went into the desert specifically to find peace and serenity, particularly through Sufi music. Thus his artworks, created using oils, acrylics and mixed media, are mainly reflecting on musicians and their musical instruments as means of the Sufi’s meditating to attain enlightenment.

The artists have never met, but Veronica had perceived a poetic connection between the two after having gone to Cairo in late 2017 to select artists for a previous Gravitart exhibition. It is she, assisted by Hiroko Ishikawa who has curated this show which unfortunately was only up for a day. But their combining of the artworks with original music by guest composer David Green and Arabic food made the day a very special occasion.

The Sky inside you relates not only to the celestial reality that El Tayeb’s dad used to navigate and traverse the desert. It also explores the mystical connection of the meditative qualities that Mostafa’s father drew upon via Sufi music.

Veronica explained to Business Daily during the Pop-Up that El Tayeb’s style of etching through layers of veneer, paint and grime to find the inner reality of the wood he had etched also exposed a poetic feature of his work. What’s more, El Tayeb’s classic profiles of men were transformed, through her interpretation, into moon times, including everything from a ‘Crescent moon, the ‘14^th day’ of the moon, a ‘Full moon’ and even a ‘New Moon’.

The curators also carried the moon concept into poetry and myth. Their invitation includes a charming mythic tale of the Moon and the Dung Beetle whose storyteller is unknown.

What is known as the installation at the very end of the exhibition which is upstairs in Peponi Garden. That is where one will find the clearest fusion of El Tayeb’s and Mostafa’s mutual memories of the desert and the sky. It takes the form of an installation of The Navigator by El Tayeb and Mostafa’s musicians with two original musical compositions by guest composer David Green from Nakuru.

We had suggested to Veronica that perhaps the twin musical compositions, one entitled The Sky, the other The Desert, ought to greet guests over a speaker system as they entered the exhibition. But apparently, Mr Green had specifically wanted guests to listen to his music via earphones provided, so they could hear and actually feel the sound of both elemental entities, one more percussive, the other more melodious.

The media that the two artists used to express themselves in this show are distinctive and different. El Tayeb used found objects, mainly wood on which he etches and scratches to created his transitional moments of the moon often using a collage format.

Mostafa on the other hand uses oils, acrylics and mixed media to create his musical ensembles, solo instrumentalists and Picasso-esque people embracing their dreams.

Both artists’ works could be described as semi-abstract, especially as Veronica’s mystical moons display her imaginative style of integrating art and other disciplines. In this case, she blends El Tayeb’s nosy profiles with astronomical shapes of the moon, offering a new way of appreciating the artist’s works on wood. But with Mostafa, there is less need for her flights of fantasy since he provides it with his art, painting in a style that Vero describes at ‘ereiric’, a term I had to look up in the dictionary, meaning ‘of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams’.  

DANCING AGAINST PLASTIC POLLUTION OF THE SEAS

                                                          Full cast of Unflow: Dancing vs. Plastic Pollution

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 30 November 2019)

Origins contemporary dance company is the creation of Arnie Umayam and Juliet Duckworth, both of whom are co-artistic directors at The Academy of Dance and Art in Karen. Both are also co-choreographers of Origins’ newest dance production entitled ‘Unflow: Dancing against Plastic Pollution.’

 “It was actually Arnie’s idea to create a show based on dancing against plastic pollution,” says Juliet right after their triumphant performance of ‘Unflow’ last Saturday night, 30^th November at Alliance Francaise.

“It’s amazing that they had a full house [in the AF garden] in spite of the downpour that didn’t stop once during their performance,” adds Harsita Waters, the cultural director at Alliance Francaise.

Fortunately, when the outdoor stage at Alliance was created, attention was given to creating a canopy sufficient to keep the rain off the stage. However, the evening’s spoken-word poet who is also UNEP’s program management officer in charge of raising awareness about ‘marine litter’, Michael Stanley-Jones, wasn’t so lucky. While he gave an original poem about the ocean and the cruel and poisonous treatment it’s received from human beings, the rains were pounding right at his feet while Origins’ dancers accompanied him and his so-called ‘UNEP speech’.

Judy Church of Seas 4 Life also gave a brief heartfelt talk, challenging her audience to help reverse the polluting trajectory that people have unconsciously caused. She suggested people start with small changes, like stop using single-use plastic containers. But speeches were thankful short.

What the show was ‘long on’ was performing graceful dances, both solos and ensemble pieces, that clearly ‘spoke’ (bodily) about the heavy price the oceans and the living creatures dependent on it are paying for marine pollution. One particularly powerful dance entitled ‘Tangled’ featured a trio, including Arnie, which got entangled in the plastic material frequently used to package bundles of everything from citrus fruits to garlic buds.

Fortunately, the show’s dance finale was upbeat and apparently meant to be an African ritual-like dance entitled ‘The Knife’ which seemed to suggest we can cut through this problem and set the oceans free if humans set their minds to it. That possibility may seem slim as per dances like the ‘Wailing Whale and ‘Delicious Plastic’ which was suffised with irony.

But by Origins choosing to use contemporary dance to raise awareness of the oceans’ plight, one feels we all can do more to try to save our seas.

MERCY’S REPORTAGE AROUND THE WORLD

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (submitted 29 November 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 several stops in between).

But it was well worth waiting for the global reportage of this amazing visual artist whose watercolor paintings, sketchbooks and illustrations were recently on display at One Off Gallery.

Kagia is one of those rare painters who humbly calls herself an illustrator, in part because she got her doctorate in Illustration from Kingston University in the 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 also can’t 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 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 as well as the 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 interest as well as her imagination. Unfortunately, this show at One Off couldn’t enable us to see all her artistic impressions of the terrain since most of them, which she captured as vivid water-color illustrations were originally drawn in one or more of her precious sketchbooks.

“I chose just a few from each sketchbook to scan and include here,” says Dr Kagia who has been keeping every one of her sketchbooks since 2002. Admitting she now has hundreds of books in safe keeping and which she says are not for sale, it was still worth making the effort in November to head to Rosslyn to see those few illustrations from her books. The images what she shared from her travels took us all the way from Bagan, Myanmar where she met and sketched an amazing ‘Giraffe-Necked woman’ to sights in Japan and South Korea back to Germany, Austria, Spain and Ferrara, Italy. It was in Ferrara that she attended an international Sketchbook Festival which brought together artists with similar artistic inclinations to her own.

Because she has been teaching, Mercy didn’t take her extensive trek around Latin America until late 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, Amb Fernando and Leonice Coimbra who attended her exhibition. “But I hope to get there next time,” she adds.

Leonice is also a professional artist in her own right and is currently having her first exhibition in Kenya entitled ‘In Vitro’ which opened December 1^st at the Nairobi National Museum.

One can hardly doubt that Kagia is likely to get back to Latin America again although there will be many more drawings that she’ll do before she returns.

Included in her ‘Travel Drawings’ is reportage of the recent days she spent in Kenya. These two are lovely and available to buy although Mercy’s watercolors, such as the ‘Kisumu Municipal Market’ are most affordable as postcards and book marks. But even these are also lovely samplings of Mercy’s amazing paintings and mean that even art-lovers with a minimal budget will be able to afford one of Mercy’s masterpieces, albeit in a minimal form. They are still available at One Off’s gift shop although they were almost gone the last time I looked.

FOTA SHOW A FAVORITE OF KENYAN ARTISTS

                                                                        DRISHNI RAJA with her flexible sculpture

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted November 29, 2019)

Friends of the Arts’ (FOTA) annual art exhibition at the International School of Kenya (ISK) has always been a favorite event for Kenyan artists who appreciate the chance to show their art in a space in which it is not only well hung; it is also a space where at least half of the exhibited works are sure to sell.

                                          The Wall at ISK'S FOTA with 2019 curator/coordinator Alina Ferrand

Sales are practically promised as the FOTA organizers normally advise the artists to keep their prices at a minimum. But this year, inflation clearly hit the FOTA show as the prices set by the artists rose significantly, but so did the quality of the work.

There were several positive changes in this year’s exhibition, both in terms of its form and its content. For one, the central curator of the show, Alina Ferrand is a professional artist herself so she set the bar quite high for artworks being included in this year’s display.

                                                                     Knife sharpener by Wilson Matunda

“We received over 400 artworks, but we selected just 216 paintings [including several sculptures] to exhibit,” says Alina who worked with a team of parents who have children attending ISK.

                                                                 Muigai Moses' Escorting the Wedding Party

Alina also had help from a visiting volunteer designer, Christopher Adam, who gave the exhibition a whole new look with his hanging a number of white cotton panels from the ceiling to the floor. In theory this should have allowed for more artworks to be shown. However, this year, there were a number of paintings that were quite large, so the number of works shown this year was comparable to years past.

                                                                                                Rose Ahoro

The one wall that has become a tradition at FOTA is another space that changed significantly this year. It is still a wall in which artists create a smaller-sized painting which they sell for a relatively minimal price. In the past few years, it hasn’t been more than Sh10,000, which was the rule for as long as I can recall.

But this year, the artists somehow skirted that ‘tradition’. Practically nothing on that geometrically-designed display sold for Sh10k. Instead, prices ran from Sh20,000 up to Sh40,000 and above.

                                                                            Akot Solip from South Sudan

It may be said that it is good for the artists to decide not to stick strictly with the past precedent. But perhaps they ‘paid the price’ since fewer than half the paintings and sculptures were sold this year. Like the affordable art show, artworks mostly went for less than Sh100,000 but only 90 of them sold. FOTA still made Sh2.1 million so that wasn’t too bad.

                                                                                       Victor Binge

“Seventy-five percent of the sales will go back to the artists and the rest is for FOTA to decide which project proposal(s) will receive their donation from this year’s exhibition,” Alina says.

One of the most stunning pieces in the exhibition was by Darshna Raja from her ‘Transience’ series. This graduate of the Royal College of Art in London had assembled a fascinatingly flexible sculpture which hung high above the rest of the show. Darshna says she constructed the piece from wooden planks, each of which she had carefully carved before painting them all black. 

                                                                               Happy Robert of Tanzania

After that she assembled the wood with hinges in such a way that allowed every slender piece to rotate and bend, ensuring absolute flexibility of the sculpture. “The work can fit in almost anywhere since it’s collapse-able,” says Darshna as she demonstrates various forms her artwork could take.

                                                                                     Evans Ngure's zipper earrings

Another attractive feature which was new this year was Chris Adam’s dazzling slide and light show that displayed every name of the 100 artists whose works were exhibited in the show. This year FOTA invited artists to submit their works from not only Kenyans, but also from Ethiopians, South Sudanese, Tanzanians and Ugandans. The inclusion of this wider range of artists added fresh flavor to the blend of Kenyan artists, many of whom have participated in the FOTA show before, such as Patrick Kinuthia, Meshack Oiro, Adrian Nduma, Rose Ahoro, Kepha Mosoti, Evans Ngure and Samuel Njuguna among many others. Gakunju Kaigwa’s sculpture was also on hand, adding value to the exhibition.

                                                                                        Gakunju Kaigwa

Among the newcomers whose works hadn’t been seen in FOTA shows before were Aisha Mwananna Mmaka, Sebastian Mnindo, Happy Robert and Usha Harish among others.

                                                                            Tanzanian artist Sebastian Mnjindo

Some FOTA volunteers took note that there seemed to be a bit of repetition among topical themes. “There seemed to be an a lot of roosters this year,” Alina noted wryly. Others observed there were quite a few beautiful women with multi-colored skin.

Nonetheless, the exhibition went well and artists whose works sold were pleased they got paid without delay.

                                                                                           Ronnie Ogwang

CHRISTMAS PLANTS ARE PERFECT GIFTS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (28 November 2019)

It was less than a week ago that Plants Galore’s supplier brought her hundreds of poinsettia plants imported from Holland.

“He had imported 600 plants but before we could receive them, we had to get all the paper work done in advance,” says Celia Hardy, who had to get so many different permits. “We had to get one permit for every kind of plant that we were receiving,” she adds.

But all the effort was worth it since she got all eight varieties of poinsettias, especially for pre-Christmas sales. “I’m not sure why the poinsettia is traditionally recognized as a Christmas plant,” says Mrs Hardy. “But as that tradition got started in the West, I suspect it had to do with winters being cold and people tending to stay indoors. The poinsettias added a touch of color and brightness to the home, so that could be why the tradition grew.”

Whatever the reason, Mrs Hardy says that just as soon as her daughter put images of her poinsettias on Facebook, the plants started flying out the door at Plants Galore. “We sold 200 in just three days so if you want to see them, you had better come right away. Our supply is almost gone!” she says, giving me a warning that I will be stuck with no story if I arrive after they’re all sold.

“One woman came in yesterday and bought 30 white poinsettias just like that,” says the owner of Plants Galore who has been a plant lover all her life. “The woman said she needed them since she is decorating her house for the holidays and her color scheme is all white,” this award-winning gardener.

Noting how many different colors the plant’s leaves come in, Mrs Hardy admits she also prefers the white poinsettias. But her clients come in and buy all eight different varieties of the plant. “Poinsettias come in pink, red, orange, yellow and white as well as several varieties of variegated-colored plants,” says her daughter Katy. By that, she means her mom has plants whose leaves come in red and white, red and yellow, orange and pink and other varieties as well. “We even have one plant that’s been sprinkled with glitter,” her mother adds.

“One lady came in yesterday and bought several plants. She came back again today because she decided she wanted to give poinsettias as Christmas presents,” says Mrs Hardy who’s been busy all this week.

But she adds that people are not just getting poinsettias for the holidays. “We also have baby Christmas trees in pots that are also going very fast,” she says. They are already decorated and perfect items to have if you live somewhere that cannot easily accommodate a large Christmas tree.

The other plant that many people get to give as a Christmas gift is the African violet. “The ones we had are already all gone,” says Mrs Hardy who received several other types of plant when her order from her importer came in.

“We have a number of collectors who keep track of what we have in stock. For instance, we just got a new Anthurium that one collector has already booked as her own,” she says. Apparently, collectors also love the African violet. They also have a fondness for the Medinilla, a rare plant that comes from Thailand, since she only has one left.

One other rare plant that collectors seem to love is a succulent called the Lithop. Mrs Hardy imported two varieties of Lithop, which her knowledgeable plant-loving friend Maria says is indigenous to Southern Africa.  “I’ve seen them both in Cape Town and in Namibia,” she says, adding she has a preference for indigenous plants. “I grew up in Rumiruti where our poinsettia had grown into a giant tree,” she says, startling this Business Daily reporter who didn’t know the plant could actually grow into a tree!

Both Maria and Mrs Hardy have a chuckle over the Lithops. “One is commonly called Baby Bottoms,” says Mrs Hardy pointing at the button-sized miniature succulent that has a crack down the centre of every ‘button’. “The other one is called Baby Toes,” Maria adds, pointing at the toe-like tubular cluster of mini-plant that she observes is not easy to keep alive.

“People tend to over-water their succulents, which is what the plants don’t like,” says Mrs Hardy who is an authority on all kinds of plants, a vast variety of which can be found at her place in Rosslyn.

RAUCOUS RADICALS DOOMED FROM THE START

BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (27 Novembeer 2019)

‘Radicals’ is a dark but action-packed play that was workshopped into being by Nice Githinji and her latest crop of Jinice Visafe Players. The players are young people, being mentored by the actress turned ‘mwalimu’, who clearly have unflattering opinions of revolutionaries bent on overturning ‘the system’ by any means necessary.

The Golden Boys is the gang of radicals named by Bilal Mwaura, the playwright (better known as an edgy actor) that took the youth’s opinions and wove them into an explosive script. He was careful not to identify them with any cult, cause or culture apart from the kind that shoots first and doesn’t bother to ask questions after that.

Most violent among them is the scary sadistic woman called Zuri (Violent Bijura). She’s the one who laughs wildly when people die and is even more gleeful when she sees killings by one of the Boys, including the bomb-maker Seven (Tedd Murene) who she’s taunted for being a coward for not wanting to die.

The play is all about the disintegration of the group after they have been ambushed and their leader seriously wounded. Many of the Boys have already died, but as they captured one of the ‘enemy’, they hope to obtain random money to use to escape over the border. But as this sorry lot has no unifying ideology, aspiration or radical goal other than destruction of the status quo, nor do they have a leader to hold them together, they only have the number two, Shadow (Francis Ouma Faiz). But he arrives at their temporary camp after the chaos has already begun. All he can do is bring in another ‘enemy’ and inform the Boys they have a snitch in their midst.

Zuri has already finished the first ‘enemy’ and clearly got a kick out of killing him. She’s so trigger-happy that nobody among them is safe, especially the dying leader’s wife (Lucy Waheto) who she suspects correctly is the mole.

In the end, everybody dies (apparently) apart from Tee (Cindy Sharrifa) who’s the only one in the group who seems to have any sense. She’s the one who finally shoots the snitch after she’s exposed by the cop who’s arrived in time to finish off this sorry lot of so-called radicals.

With effective sound and lighting by Tim King’oo (who’s soon to stage Sibi Okumu’s ‘Kaggia’), Radicals projects a clear-cut message, that radicalism doesn’t work.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘From Misery to Joy: A Journey of Endurance’

By Asaph Ng'ethe Macua

Self-Published, 2019

Reviewed by Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 26 November 2019)

Master artist Mzee Asaph Ng’ethe Macua is now nearly 90 years old. But for his first 30 years he battled life-threatening diseases, due partly to early years of poverty and corporal punishment meted out by cruel teachers who didn’t know better.

Yet not even ill-health and frailty (ultimately resulting in loss of one lung) could stop the first-born son of an Anglican reverend from becoming one of the first barefoot lads to reach Alliance Boys and then gain admission to Makerere University where he was a classmate of a future Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki.

Mzee Macua began writing his autobiography, ‘From Misery to Joy: A Journey of Endurance’ in his eighties after defying countless obstacles, including the myth that Art cannot make one a successful professional and the lie that Art is useless. The amazing life he recounts in colorful detail in his book clearly shows how Art can be fulfilling not only financially but also career-wise.

Having been the Chief Artist with first the East African Literature Bureau and then the Kenya Literature Bureau, he had been surrounded for years by books, designing book covers and drawing illustrations correlative with book content. Yet he noted that in all those years, he had never come across an autobiography (leave alone a biography) of a Kenyan artist. There have been countless articles written about them, but he’s correct to claim his book is the first.

Filled with anecdotes about the extraordinary people he has met in his life, Mzee Macua was at Makerere when Princess Elizabeth became Queen and he was selected to be one of the few students to meet the Royals. He also met the first President Kenyatta several times, painting his portrait and even witnessing his being handed the reigns of power by Prince Philip in 1963.

But Macua’s book doesn’t just dwell on his encounters with the high and mighty. He’s also met a myriad of ordinary people, particularly medics who helped save his life even when his condition seemed hopeless and he’d literally spent years in hospital beds.  

One surprising detail that Macua alludes to is with reference to his meeting Kenya’s former Vice President Joseph Murumbi who he says wanted to establish at National Art Gallery and even held meetings with other top government officials like the then Minister of Education, Jeremiah Nyaga. But he suggests the reason the project failed was because “some artists for their own selfish reasons…opposed the idea.” This is contrary to the commonly-held belief that it was forces inside the Kenya government who opposed the plan. But as Macua’s perspective is based on an eye-witness account, it’s difficult to dispute.

Another example of what he calls ‘unfinished business’, Macua writes that he’d hoped to paint a Black Jesus for the church. But the idea was adamantly opposed by church elders who, even in the 1990s insisted Jesus must be painted white. Macua wasn’t ahead of his time. He was right on time, as is his book, the masterpiece he always wanted to create.

GITHUI’S MYSTERIOUS MUSES REVEALED AT RED HILL GALLERY

BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 25 November 2019)

From the moment we first saw Samuel Githui’s Lamu triptych with those donkeys casually meandering through that carless city’s narrow streets, we knew we were seeing work by an exceptional Kenyan artist.

His three-piece oil painting was on display at RaMoMa Gallery several years ago. But even then, we could see that Githui wasn’t one to follow trends or popular tastes like painting portraits of pretty girls in splashy contrasting hues. Instead, his art testified to his being a true 21^st century Kenyan artist who was creating according to the rhythm of his own soul.

For instance, he was the first Kenyan to paint guys on bicycles loaded down with bread crates (or without) which, by now, has become another common theme seen emulated by a number of Kenyan artists. But even when others tried to recreate his style, none could quite get his way of painting strokes which were neither hyper-realistic nor impressionistic, yet they were vivid and fresh all the same.

Then Githui went a step further, attempting to translate three-dimensional cinematic motion into a painterly two-D genre. His stunning black and white series of a Kenyan doing a contemporary dance was ingeniously designed as if it were frame-by-frame of a motion picture. It was first shown at a Pop-Up exhibition curated by Circle Art Gallery and later displayed at what was then Kuona Trust (now Kuona Artists Collective).

 “It was as if he was trying to capture movement in a static form,” comments Erica Rossler-Musch, co-owner of the Gallery with her spouse Hellmuth. She says there seemed to be a hint of the same idea in Githu’s current solo exhibition at Red Hill entitled simply ‘One’.
In ‘One’, Githui has done something else again. He’s ventured off into a whole other artistic stratosphere which is not just unexpected and original. It’s also baffling and reflective of the artist’s relentless quest to discover new dimensions in his art.

In this regard, Githui claims his intense style of combining swirling shapes and lines with ochre-toned hues has been dictated to him by the paint itself. Or more precisely, it was the primer coating that he put down on his large canvases that compelled him to draw and then paint in surrealistic shapes, patterns and forms.

Explaining the chronological unfolding of his nine paintings on display at Red Hill, he brings us to his initial efforts in this new direction. In the first work, he still paints including figurative forms, such as profiles of old bearded men and animals.

But as he continued to work on other canvases and respond to the way the other primers dried on his canvases, his art grew increasingly more intense, abstract and other-worldly.

The artist describes his process quite clearly: “I felt the need to let the medium dictate the cause of action rather than taking the lead on a directive and executive role of creating the work. By doing so, I want to elaborate the relationship and interaction of different media (in these works, predominantly acrylic) and discover optional ways and possibilities to communicate and express myself in my artworks.” 

In the end, nearly all hints of figurative works are gone. His most recent pieces simply reveal beautiful abstract swirls of color, suggesting anything from volcanic eruptions to eyes of hurricanes.

Whatever his paintings might mean, Githui may speak about the process, but the art itself sustains the mystery and magic of his fearless genius. The show is a must-see for anyone wanting to know works by one of the way-showers of Kenyan contemporary art.

Ironically, the last piece that he prepared for his Red Hill show has a giant pyramidic triangle at the centre of the work. It’s practically transparent, yet one imagines we can see ancient muses revealing themselves from deep inside his artwork. Or could they be speaking through his sub-conscious?. Or perhaps Githui tapped into his own mysterious Sphinx who’s been guiding the process all along? Who knows!!

Meanwhile, this Sunday, 1^st December at 5pm, ‘In Vitro’ an exhibition by Brazilian artist Leonice Coimbra is opening at Nairobi National Museum. Leo has created an exhibition that challenges rampant consumerism with her collections of recycled glass containers all of which are filled with things meant to amuse and generate wonder. Her show runs through December.

Finally, on 7^th December, the book launch and art exhibition of nearly 90-year-old Kenyan artist Asaph Ng’ethe Nacua’s art and autobiography, ‘From Misery to Joy’ will open at 3pm also at Nairobi National Museum.