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How blotches blot artist’s copybook

Friday June 24 2016
EASucked1906

Left, Projection, and above, Sucked into the Abyss, by Boniface Maina. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but after a point it signifies not only admiration but also a bankrupt imagination.

Exactly where that point lies I shall let you decide should you visit an exhibition of 30 paintings by Boniface Maina.

All are examples of his latest style, which is made up of spots, blots, blotches and stains of coffee and ink on paper.

On that pretty matrix are figures vaguely reminiscent of the fairytale drawings of Victorian book illustrators… scary monsters with spindly limbs ending in claw like hands and feet. Bedtime horrors, their bodies are filled in with closely contoured lines, representing fingerprints as marks of identity.

This is a metaphor used effectively only six months ago in an exhibition at the same place — the Art Space off Riverside Drive in Nairobi — by Paul Onditi in his show about migrants.

Been there, seen it, now seeing again by a different hand.

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Maina, who, in 2013, set up the Brush Tu Art Studio in Buru Buru, Nairobi, has been through a period of introspection, we are told, and these melancholy works reveal his inner turmoil and are said to be his most honest paintings to date.

Certainly I preferred them to his previous creations — acrylics in maroons, browns and greens; the sludgy end of the scale — that featured people with malleable bodies and droopy faces coupled with soft saxophones and bendy keyboards. They appeared to be quotations from Salvadore Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, with its melting pocket watches.

Maina describes himself as a Surrealist, so I doubt if that is purely coincidence.

Unfortunately, his new work also reminded me of other artists — several East Africans in fact, all of whom got there first with their blots, splashes and stains.

Step forward Peterson Kamwathi with his Constellation series where the blotches were the stars; Gor Soudan in his show Join the Dots at The Circle in September last year, where the paintings featured a taut mesh of ink lines over spotted backgrounds (a technique he had been exploring since at least 2014 as part of his Bubbles and Shells series); Jackie Karuti with a thoughtful group of drawings about migrants, that included fences and watchtowers; and latterly Longinos Ngala and Onyis Martin, whose loose watercolour technique allows diluted colours to ebb and flow across the paper, adding an ethereal quality to their glowing figures.

In the hands of these artists, each mark floats freely, has relevance and enhances the overall statement, but in Maina’s hands they appear merely derivative and rather leaden.

The Blot must be the new trend in Kenyan art. Blotism is thriving among us!

In which case let it please be left to those who handle it well and free the disciples (the Blotista?) to worship elsewhere.

If it is skill they seek to imitate, let their model be Paul Cezanne, as he has been for almost everyone else who has lifted a brush since the start of the last century.

And now it is my turn to wear the dunce’s cap.

While in a recent article I castigated artists for not attending to their basic skills, I managed one fundamental error myself — misspelling a name.

I have consistently referred to Ehoodi Kichapi as Kichape. Kichapi is Kiswahili for the beater; Kichape, for the beaten.

Kichapi is correct and the difference is significant, so my apologies to all who need them.

I could plead temporary insanity, but sorry to say it was just carelessness. I really have no excuse.

Which leads us to the barely excusable paintings of Jared Njuguna at the Little Art Gallery, off Nandi Road, Karen.

All are acrylics and they include fish finished in metallic gold paint, half a violin and musical score, a couple sheltering beneath an umbrella amid trees, a lighthouse and a canvas of drips in purple and gold.

At best it was too soon to offer Njuguna a one-man show in a gallery slowly building a reputation for high standards. Previous exhibitors have included the established sculptor Maggie Otieno and the exciting find Elias Mung’ora, with his vibrant street scenes.

Now we have Njuguna’s Passions of Nature, and even this artist’s enthusiasm and some awakening compositional skill cannot disguise weak drawing coupled with an uneven, chalky palette.

The gallery owner found himself unable to attend the exhibition opening… something about urgent business at his other place in a Kisumu shopping mall. Regrets, just couldn’t make it.

Enough said.

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