To tourists, East Africa means the Big Five — and to art tourists, animal paintings are often high on the agenda.

So many of the region’s artists offer animals as their subjects that choosing just five seems an impossible task.

In Tanzania, we have the Tingatinga paintings rich in flora and fauna; in Uganda, a wealth of animals and birds on the wall; while in Kenya, in spite of the current tendency to offer weighty concepts that some artists then shove arrogantly in our faces with precious few skills to support their polemics, other artists have the wisdom to let any message reveal itself more subtly through the excellence of their paintings, drawings and sculptures.

A visit to the Kuona Trust Art Centre near State House, Nairobi, produced one such delight, a superb sculpture of a dog made from bits of steel.

I am often surprised by the accuracy of those animals you see on every roadside in Nairobi, welded by jua kali fabricators who have discovered — and developed — a market for garden sculpture. These are made of a steel skin welded over a modelled frame.

But the dog I saw was on a different level.

By the Ethiopian sculptor Metasebia Simachew who is on residency at Kuona, the frame was the figure; the hind legs made from car con-rods and steel dowels serving as sinews and tendons.

Simachew caught perfectly the tension between body and limbs and the twisting, downwards spiral of a pit bull’s stance. It realised the dog’s vitality and form while producing a telling piece of sculpture.

Dog, by Metasebia Simachew. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Pretty well every gallery you visit will have animals somewhere on the walls or propped up in the racks; the World Elephant Day show at Banana Hill just outside Nairobi being just one current example.

Just down the road from Banana Hill, at the One-Off Gallery in Rosslyn, outstanding paintings include one of a black bull by Ehoodi Kichapi.

A flash of orange and red behind the lowering head turns the bull’s eyes into burning coals, focusing its murderous strength, while the high diagonal line of the shoulder accentuates massive bulk. This is an animal not to be messed with; one horn a vicious curve waiting to hook the unwary.

As a symbol of chaos unleashed it reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s poem The Bull of Bendylaw, in which the sea surges in and floods a kingdom. The bull is Plath’s metaphor for that unruly, untamable sea (“A bull snouted sea that wouldn’t stay put,” she calls it) and in her poem I see similarities with Kichapi’s rowdy canvases as he attempts to contain and explain the pandemonium surrounding us.

This bull is part of a portfolio of 10 works on paper that gallery owner Carol Lees is sending to Cape Town together with a selection of his larger paintings for exhibition at the new Nini Gallery; a developing partnership that will see work by Peter Ngugi, El Tayeb and Beatrice Wanjiku heading to South Africa, following a current show at the Nini by Michael Soi.

In the racks nearby, another gallery artist, the American Olivia Pendergast, has a watercolour drawing of a domestic tabby cat sitting upright; the markings threatening in art as in life to disrupt the outline. Pendergast gets the set of the head right and describes the softness of the fur very well, but by leaving the eyes a vacant yellow has given it a curiously unfocused look.

Many artists have captured their cats on paper or canvas. After all, pet cats are usually around, frequently asleep or too lazy to move (except when tormenting something), are generally beautiful and with their muscles sliding beneath the fur make an endlessly fascinating — and tricky — subject.

For my money the best of the lot were by Gwen John, who caught a cat’s lithe presence more precisely than any other artist I know. Even Leonardo’s sketches of cats are static in comparison. Worth a Google any day.

Propped up nearby is a vigorous painting of a hyena’s head by Simon Muriithi that puts that snarling gape right in the room with us. This hyena glares at us, its eyes piercing roundels of yellow, black and white, and looks ready to take us as an appetiser.

Then there is Timothy Brooke: Take your pick to complete the Five from a lioness slinking through the grass; an elephant, its ears flapping lazily in the shade; or cattle with sunlight dappled on their flanks.

The descriptive excellence of Brook’s work springs from rock solid drawing. He has been at it so long it has become instinctive and it is an instinct every artist should have. Get the drawing right and the rest falls into place.

It was the London School painter Frank Auerbach who said of his portraits that he was not trying to catch the likeness, but the presence of his sitters… and you can apply that to any good artist and every subject.

A camera can get the likeness; you need a painter to interpret and present reality — what Francis Bacon called “The brutality of fact.”