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GALLERIES: A celebration of the glory of life

Friday May 18 2018
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Listening, left, and right, The Best Gift by James Mbuthia. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY | NMG

By FRANK WHALLEY

What a pleasure it is to find a gallery full of sunshine and light.

Cheery colours, smiling faces, general happiness all around. There are flowers in many hues and little birds that would whistle and sing.

Enter the world of James Mbuthia, an artist who makes achingly beautiful paintings that soak the walls with tenderness and love.

Fifteen of his paintings are on show at the new Stables Annex of the One-Off gallery in Rosslyn, to the west of Nairobi, for one more week and thereafter in store — and they are a joyous shout for all of us.

These are paintings you can enjoy just by looking but if you want a little more depth then this is an artist whose background commands attention.

Mbuthia believes he has a form of synsethesia, a condition in which the senses mix. For him every colour has a sound and every sound a shape.

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Mbuthia, a figurative painter immersed in his narrative of harmony between people and landscape, their happiness and ultimate fulfilment, therefore literally orchestrates both his palette and his compositions.

For this painter red is a high note, blues and greens sound deeper, while dark red, the colour of blood, can scream. Riotous patterns — and there are many — are a continuation of the music of life.

Often that music is symphonic with swelling chords and crashing crescendos, occasionally it’s jazz; a riff on the glorious muddle of our lives.

Mbuthia sees blue as the colour of the future and it features often in his paintings, one good example being in Listening, a highlight of this show. It is of a seated woman; a subject beloved by most of the great artists of the 20th Century.

A blue bird is perched on the back of her chair in a painting in which formal excellence abounds. The blue of the bird echoes the woman’s blue dress, the overall richness maintained by the green jacket resounding off the complementary reds of the walls, the chair and the flowers on the mantel beside her.

A yellow and black chequered floor dances the jitterbug against plain walls while the clean black outline of the model is economical and accurate, a spare and telling trumpet solo in which the clarity of the drawing proclaims her form, weight and mass.

This superficially simple yet subtle composition (the way the woman is angled across her chair, for instance) plus the cunning with which the artist has manipulated the tonal range of a restricted palette makes this the finest work in a fine exhibition.

Style

Other stylistic tics mark Mbuthia’s work.

In The Best Gift another bird appears, this time Mbuthia’s version of a dove, the sign of peace, as a young man shyly offers a small flower to his love.

Three of the brightest paintings see heads meld into one — in Whisper, In His Arms and The Land Beyond — signifying unity; that of lovers, families and nations.

In addition, faces are painted in different areas of colours, promoting the artist’s belief that in spite of our different races, tribes and cultures, we are one. In these noisy works this symbolism is borrowed from Cartoon Joseph, with whom Mbuthia worked and studied at the Banana Hill art centre where he began his career.

In many paintings too, innocuously in the background of a village scene, is a church; a simple hut with a cross at the gable (again a common motif in Cartoon Joseph’s early work). It helps to know that the artist is a born-again Christian, a pastor who sees his daily life as an endorsement of his faith.

But less is more, they say.

Echoing the simplicity of Listening is Visited, in which a woman stands in a spotted dress next to a leafy twig denoting growth and fertility, while perched on a branch to her right is the visitor, an owl. Mbuthia is a Kikuyu and in Kikuyu lore the owl is a bird of bad omen.

But Mbuthia shuns that reading and instead sees the owl from the more universal standpoint as a bird of wisdom. The woman is becoming wise as she embraces a promising future.

It is good to see a painter whose symbolism of love and hope springs naturally from his canvases instead of being forced down our throats until we gag.

Rembrandt’s self portraits in old age tell us more about humanity than any number of clever concepts; Turner’s late landscapes salute the raw power of natural forces way beyond our control; Van Gogh’s swirling, stabbing brushstrokes speak of his inner turmoil, mirrored in our own souls.

And James Mbuthia, the Kenyan pastor with a radiant palette quietly painting the dreams he has rooted in reality; what of him?

His is a lyrical celebration of the glory of life — and thank God someone is doing it.

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