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.

Typical is Nairobi River shown as a wasteland, huts huddled together for their own protection.

The Prussian blue of Nyambari transmutes into the sharper cyan of a chemical blue stain that permeates the river and leaches into the surrounding land.

Those who live amid this desolation walk shoulders hunched beside the river. In the background trees stand starkly as survivors.

In addition to the easel paintings there are 11 oil studies, each around A4 size, pinned loosely to a board.

They have a vitality absent in a few of her larger landscapes; an energy that comes from a vision focused down as though through the lens of a magnifying glass.

This energy comes, I feel, from her stated mission which is to capture the Kenya she believes is fast disappearing.

The title of Rahab Shine’s exhibition is A Piece to Remember and her real subject is not so much village life but the fact that it is already beginning to vanish around her.

The ways she knew as a child are largely gone; even the slums are changing fast.

It all needs to be set down so future generations can see what life was like.

Shine writes: “Day by day slums are being upgraded, which is good, and one day it will be forgotten.

“I realised that for coming generations I should do something as an artist as one who has lived in this generation where there is a lot of oppression.”

She adds simply: “My art will tell the story.” And Shine has a point.

Who remembers, for example, what the land once looked like where the Village Market at Gigiri now stands?

It was a slum. Its inhabitants were kicked out in the 1990s.

And what of Kibera, reputedly Africa’s biggest slum, where the wood, tin and mud houses are rapidly being replaced by blocks of flats?

Not rapidly enough, some might say.

A Piece to Remember is the title of the exhibition — and as Rahab Shine points out, every piece in it contains a memory; a fragment of our passing lives.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email: fwhalley@gmail.com