Cheery wave from the walls

Sometimes it's good to relax … not to take life too seriously nor to look for too much meaning in anything – just to enjoy what’s there.

I found the ideal place to do exactly that this week, a restaurant in Nairobi where the walls are hung with an exhibition of Tingatinga paintings, brought here from Tanzania.

An explosion of light, colour and pattern they delight the eye. And their cheerful subjects would bring a smile to anyone’s face.

Tingatinga painting occupies that middle ground between what I would (perhaps rather pretentiously) term the High Art of formal easel painting, and the raw energy of graffiti and paintings on kiosks and matatus.

It is produced by a school of artists working almost on a production line basis, borrowing motifs from each other but painting within a framework of bright colours and flat pattern, without linear perspective.

They are decorative and joyful pieces of work.

I write “almost on a production line basis” because although the artists work together (not unlike the Kamba carvers in their sheds) on a common cause, each produces a painting from start to finish.

In that they are unlike the artists working in the Chinese painting villages where one man will paint in the backgrounds, another the clouds, a third do the houses and fourth specialise in animals or whatever.

At first sight most of the Tingatinga paintings look the same.

There appears to be a restricted range of subjects — flowers, birds, animals, market and village scenes.

There is one man who does nothing but butterflies and several who specialise in shetanis … those devils of East Africa folklore.

But actually that’s quite a wide range of subject matter.

Perhaps it is the accent on pattern covering every inch of canvas and the flat, enamelled colours that give that similarity, reminiscent of the overall chip-carved patterning of traditional Swahili doorways, or the busy all-over working on kitenges and kanga cloths.

Interestingly, many of the Tingatinga artists are Makua, from the south of Tanzania and across the border in Mozambique.

Traditional Makua art is stylistically related to the Makonde and to my mind it is more than a coincidence that the Tingatinga paintings of (for instance) writhing, chattering shetani share their iconography with the famous Makonde Tree of Life mpingo wood sculptures, to be found in an airport or curio shop near you.