TUMS AND LECCHINI: A TALE OF TWO ARTISTS AT ONE OFF

                                         A TALE OF TWO ARTISTS AT ONE OFF

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Mike Lecchini and Tums Yeshim are two European artists who, since last Saturday, October 30^th, have solo exhibitions at One Off Gallery.

Both could be described as ‘accidental artists’ since both were professionally trained in fields other than fine art. One’s an engineer by training who has been tinkering with ingenious gadgetry practically all his life. The other’s an architect whose houses have been described as works of art in their own right.

Both have worked professionally in their respective fields for some time. Yet the impulse to express themselves more artistically took them to the point where they are now showing their best works at One Off.

Tums, the engineer turned eccentric sculptor, has taken over The Loft with his delicate and rarefied works, while Mike, the architect turned painter has covered nearly all the Stables’ walls with his equally inspired abstract paintings.

Both men have concerns for proportion, balance, precision, and spacial relations in their art. Yet those concerns are manifest in very different ways by either artist.

In Lecchini’s case, he deals with lines, colors, and patterns geometrically, as if he was working out an analytical equation. His paintings feel like mathematical constructions in which his rectangles and squares generate a soothing, harmonizing effect. His color schemes further enhance that calming influence, given the consistency of his color patterns and his choices to situate specific hues next to one another.

If one has an opportunity to see any of the local homes that Mark has designed in Karen and Muthaiga, you will see the way his paintings echo his architectural strategies. Both are built with analytical as well as angular precision. Both bear witness to a simplicity and sleek, contemporary concept of refined line.

Yet it’s in the paintings that he plays with color, often after constructing perpendicular lines that take shape as grids. It’s there that he ponders which colors to use in the patterning and color coding of his works.

Tums also creates his sculptures with mathematical precision. Yet unlike Lecchini who works exclusively in oils, Tums creates complex sculptures out of found objects that he’s either picked up over the years from public and private trash sites or been given by friends who know he’s got eclectic tastes.

Best known for his marvelous mobile sculptures that most effectively reveal his fascination for delicate balance and funky features like metallic and glass bird wings that seem to fly, Tums has only one in this show since the rest have recently ‘flown the coup’ (been sold).

Yet his other pieces more than make up for his missing mobiles. One of the most stunning is a giant piece of driftwood which has an uncanny resemblance to some prehistoric precursor to contemporary man. “All I did to him was give him [steel] feet to stand on,” says Tums whose driftwood Neaderthal stands erect around four feet tall.

Yet if he did little to touch up the pristine beauty of the natural wood form, he took his time designing a miniature metallic globe that he says was the most precious piece in his show. It wasn’t the most peculiar however. That prize could easily go to his gold-leafed baboon scull which he’d also found unpainted in somebody’s dumpster.

Both Tums and Mark draw inspiration for their artistry from nature. One can easily see it in Tums’ birds, butterflies, and high-flying fish. It might seem less apparent in Mark’s abstract patterns. But the newest painting in his display reveals what the artist says might be a radically new trend, inspired by the recent explosion of colors in the floral garden that’s grown up just outside his weekend studio.

The studio itself is a kind of weekend retreat where the architect decamps and morphs into the contemplative artist who takes his time allowing his oils paints to work the magic he loves to see emerge on his canvas.

“I’m quite stressed throughout the week, but I find painting has a calming effect on me,” he tells BDLife. But he admits he might never have had this first solo exhibition if it hadn’t been for his girlfriend Talitha who arranged it all with One Off curator-director Carol Lees.

In contrast, it was Lees herself who came to Tums’ workshop-studio at Kitengela Glass Trust and, seeing his latest set of sculptures, (which he jokingly calls ‘trinkets’) invited him to have his own one-man exhibition through November 21^st.

Fortunately, One Off has room enough for both artists, the one born and raised in the UK, the other born in Cypress but raised right here in Kenya.