Fragments of our passing lives

When the artist Shine Tani went to paint at his uncle’s village, he found more than a landscape worth putting on canvas.

He found his future wife.

For living near his uncle in Kiambu, was a girl he quickly discovered was called Rahab Njambi and who, he was elated to be told, had a love of art and wanted to learn how to paint.

Four children later, Shine and Rahab run the Banana Hill Art Studio a few kilometres outside Nairobi — the epicentre of a movement that has won international recognition.

Like Ngecha, just up the road, it is home to a group of artists who have been acclaimed for the freshness and originality of their work.

And among them is Rahab Shine.

Her current exhibition at the Banana Hill Art Studio is of landscapes, completed mainly in Kiambu in the villages she knows and loves.

Some 30 of her studio paintings are on show in the main hall — large landscapes with the colours applied mainly with a palette knife.

Occasional dashes of a blazing pink or scarlet, plus a fierce lemon yellow enliven the village scenes, which are interspersed by views of slums and a couple of paintings from the Coast.

All have a curiously high viewpoint, as though the artist is looking at her subject from the top of a hill, which of course she might well be.

One picture is of Githogoiyo, near her home village of Kamahindu where she first met Shine Tani.

The orange that suffuses the sky indicates a warm and loving sunset. These are homes the artist knows well.

In Nyambari, near Limuru, a couple head home on a bicycle —a curiously intimate moment in the larger landscape.

In some of her paintings, the skyscrapers of Nairobi loom large in the background.

Shine’s pictures of slums interest me. They are harsher than the village scenes; dark strokes jabbed on the canvas and a more intense palette.