Advertisement

Fantasy world of a woodcut printmaker

Saturday October 14 2017
jsk

Untitled, by John “Silver” Kimani. PHOTO | KARI MUTU

By KARI MUTU

A visit to the Creativity Gallery of the Nairobi National Museum is like stepping into a make-believe world.

On display are works from painter and woodcut printer John “Silver” Kimani.

Kimani describes his art as, “Bringing my dreams and fantasies into reality of textures and colours.”

He specialises in woodcut prints, which are images cut from wood panels, printed onto canvas and then painted. Using a colour reduction process allows him to create multi-coloured prints using just one board. However, this means that only a limited number of prints can be made from each board.

Painting under the name John Silver, his uses warm colours for his subjects against blue-green backgrounds.

There are paintings of people, animals and scenes in alternative realities, which include humped, long-horned cattle with bodies covered in zebra stripes or leopard spots.

Advertisement

Angelic beings blow horns while seated on floating books. Women with high heels have wineglasses instead of heads.

The woodcut prints have thin and spiky brushstrokes, and a number of them are untitled.

The woman wearing a green sombrero in Joy in the Rich 2, is playing a bugle horn while riding resplendently through a village on an elephant with spindly legs and three fish tails. Birds, flowering plants, a floating basin of fruit and a woman growing out of the earth add to this fantastical scene.

Also on show is a selection of Kimani’s oil paintings on canvas. The drawings are equally quirky, but painted in flatter strokes. They show puffy-cheeked people and whimsical animals in unusual situations drawn in smooth curvy outlines.

The picture Market Day I, is of a man carrying a pot sitting on a tortoise-like animal and facing a woman with a baby on her back and basin balanced on her head.

Kimani’s paintings have been displayed at Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and he won the best woodcut artist award in Japan in 2015.

The current exhibition runs until early November, and more of his work is available at his studio at the Kuona Trust Art Centre in Nairobi.

Advertisement