MIKE KYALO WON AT MANJANO AND AT BONHAM'S IN LONDON
By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 7 May 2021)
Mike Kyalo
is a busy man. His molten plastic painting, ‘Garbage Collectors’ just won third
prize at the annual Manjano Nairobi County Art Competition which was recently
on display with other winning works at Alliance Francaise.
Kyalo has also
got a solo exhibition at the Banana Hill Art Gallery entitled ‘Turning Point’
which will be up through the end of May. Incidentally, he also had his
paintings in last weekend’s KMS Affordable Art Show at Nairobi National Museum.
But as proud
as he is about all the above, Kyalo just made his first international sale when
his painting was sold at Bonham’s Contemporary African Art Auction in London
for 402 Euros.
That’s quite
a contrast from when he first started winning art competitions in primary
school.
“Art wasn’t
on the syllabus, but me and my classmates used to chip in 50 cents each and compete
for who could create the best drawing,” says Kyalo who was inspired by local
cartoonists like Gado and Madd. He never made a fortune from those contests,
but he says he invariably won.
Then at
Matungulu Boys Secondary, Kyalo founded the Art Club and was elected club
chairman. “And after I painted a portrait of the school’s Principal, we were given
an art room of our own,” he says proudly.
He was still
in secondary when he first went to the GoDown Art Centre and met Patrick Mukabi
who would become his mentor for several years.
Kyalo says
his first big breakthrough was winning a one-month artist residency through the
Kenya Arts Diary Foundation in 2012. “I spent a month working at Kuona Trust,
which ended with my first solo art exhibition,” he recalls.
Kyalo has
been working non-stop ever since. Mukabi was a masterful mentor, and one can
see his influence in Kyalo’s art. But from the beginning, he’s been cultivating
his own distinctive style which one can see most vividly if they make it to
Banana Hill Gallery.
There he has
almost 50 paintings coming in all sizes with practically all of them focused on
the same theme. And that is ordinary Kenyan working people. It’s a subject that
increasing numbers of local artists have picked up on, but none do it in the
same distinctive style as Kyalo.
He started
off some years back painting boda boda motorcycle taxis, and they are
still a popular subject of his work. But his art has branched out into
portraits of other kinds of transport.
In his
Banana Hills show which he entitles “Turning Point’, he paints all sorts of
local transport services apart from automobiles. He paints everything from
bicycles, mkokotenis, and two-wheeled trolleys to tow trucks, wheel
barrows, and backpack carriers. In every case, the transport person is loaded
with luggage, be it sugar cane, bread crates, cabbages, or boxed-up precious
cargo which might be cash, company shares or even a carefully-packaged birthday
cake.
His subjects
are what we might now call ‘essential workers’, those without whom the entire
commercial system would practically fall apart. Granted, such workers are not
glamorous. But they are definitely hard working. Kyalo’s paintings give them
the honor and attention that they deserve.
Asked what
he means by ‘Turning Point,’ Kyalo says he rarely had painted women before,
only working men. He also has tried his hand at landscape and wildlife. But his
forte is his portraits of busy Kenyans, most of whom are laborers on the move
delivering everything from rocks in a wheel barrow at a construction site to
water, people, and personal luggage, all of which could be loaded onto
someone’s bike, back, trolley, or rickshaw-like mkokoteni.
But given
that Kyalo is painting Kenyans in the here and now, he also paints a few
portraits of families in lockdown. Their situations seem more static. But one
can also feel there are important deliberations going on, like how are we going
to cope when our breadwinners don’t have work during COVID?
Where one
will be able to see another ‘turning point’ in Kyalo’s art is at Alliance
Francaise. There is where his first ‘plastic painting’ won for its stunning
approach to up-cycyling plastic trash.
“I would
boil the plastics in three separate sufuria,” says Kyalo. “One for each
primary color, red, blue, and yellow. Then I would paint with the hot
[liquified[ plastic,” he explains.
Taking his art
to another level with this more environmentally-conscious approach is one more
turning point we can see in the award-winning work of Mike Kyalo.
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