By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted May 27, 2024)
Sophie Walbeoffe-Simpkin has to be the most prolific painter I know.
One might
assume that’s because she’s renowned for ‘painting with both hands’. But that cannot
explain the way she can paint anything from dogs and sand dunes, birds and bees,
dhows and donkeys, to even the ceremonial coronation of King Charles, the
series of which friends transformed into elegant table mats that have sold well
in the UK.
But artists
rarely gain much from such commercial ventures, suggests Sophie who also admits
she does it for the fun of it.
“My favorite
art[ms1]
teacher told us we must ‘Make painting your best friend.’ That way, you’re
bound to love it and have fun with it;” which is what this effervescent woman invariably
does. It's also one reason she is such an insatiable painter, whether living in
Kenya where I met her recently at her studio in Karen.
I was
fortunate to find her since she travels a lot, always to paint as she did in
Jerusalem where she spent four years learning about life in the Middle East,
with its complex mix of cultures, politics, and artistic traditions. This was
long before the current crisis in Palestine, but even then, her husband Piers
was working in Gaza for the Red Cross. She also spends time in London, where
she’s originally from.
Having lived
in Kenya the last 30 years, Sophie’s last Nairobi exhibition was one she
curated right at the outset of the COVID shutdown. It was a charity show,
‘Artists against Hunger’, and it helped raise Sh10 million to assist several
local aid agencies working with under-privileged children. In addition to the
COVID show, Sophie tells us of several other solo and group exhibitions. She’s participated
in those, thanks to her London-based gallery, the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery.
And in
recent days, she has been busy making artistic books. The first one she did was
autobiographical entitled ‘Painting with both hands.’ In it, she revealed
her love of watercolors as well as her new-found affection for illustrating
books. She wrote of how she rarely uses photographs of the places or people she
wants to paint. Instead, she sketches quickly on the spot, aiming to capture an
entire ambience as well as the quality of light at that particular moment, and
the emotional mood of the people or
animals that she might paint.
Then, after
her first book came ‘Impressions of Amboseli’, the book she produced together
with Cynthia Moss in the course of over four years. Cynthia is the esteemed animal
scientist and researcher who has lived among the elephants of Amboseli for many
years. Sophie’s watercolors and illustrations of not just the elephants but all
the creatures in Amboseli National Park made it as much an artistic achievement
as an account of Cynthia’s life among the elephants.
Then came “Lamu”,
a gem of a book that included a whole series of watercolors revealing all the
elegant fauna and flora around the island. The book itself had been commissioned
by her dear friend, the German restaurateur, Herbert Menzer. Herbert had ‘accidentally’
stumbled upon Lamu in his travels and fell in love with Shela village where he
lives for six months a year.
Meeting
Sophie and seeing the quality of her art, especially the watercolors of Shela,
he couldn’t resist bankrolling the book which came out in 2018.
Her next
project was based on Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. Her topic was
based on letters her dear mum had left her after she’d passed on a few years
ago. They’d come to her directly from Kipling himself since Sophie’s mum was
the author’s god-daughter. In the letters, Kipling told the mum all about the Just
So stories. Sophie took them to be a sign from her mum that she was meant
to do something special with them. So, first, she illustrated the stories;
then, she went all around UK schools reading them to school children, most of
whom had never been introduced the Kipling’s whimsy before.
Her current
project is producing another children’s book about a friendship between her dog
and an elephant. Entitled ‘Pepper and Poncho’, it’s inspired by her own
little Dachshund and all the elephants she painted in Amboseli while working
with Cynthia Moss.
That book
was about to go to press as we spoke, meaning Sophie was already working on her
next project--a series of beautiful jungle-like paintings of Kenya’s flora and
fauna that the public might see before they too become her next book.
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