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Lay me down by green waters... and blue trees and fields of shocking pink

Thursday October 17 2013
art

Disastrous anatomy... Zebras by Nam Eunju. Photo/Frank Whalley

Bright yellow skies, blue trees, green waters, fields of shocking pink and orange everywhere… welcome to the wacky world of a painter who has fallen in love with Kenya.

The artist is Eunju Nam (or possibly Nam Eunju) and her exhibition, called Love and Harmony of Kenya, is currently showing at the National Museum.

She comes to us with a list of credentials nearly as long as the Aga Khan Hall in which her work is hung.

The lavishly produced catalogue lists 15 of her exhibitions, dating back to 1985, and it is heartening to see that she was once a professor in the art department of the Dong-A University, in Busan, South Korea and participates in many Bible-based and Christian group shows.

Less heartening is the fact that our guest artist is called Eunju Nam on the museum wall poster but Nam Eunju in the flyer.

One of them must be right and while you may think it does not really matter a Nam, but in fact it shines a light into a dark corner of the NMK’s many excellent presentations… a seeming inability to get spellings and names correct.

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To take another recent example, does the artist Anne Mwiti spell her name Ann or Anne? And does it matter anyway? Well, yes, I thinke it does mattere. Our name is our identity — all we take to the grave — and it is a courtesy therefore to spell it correctly and get it the right way round.

Anne Mwiti (yes, it’s Anne with an “e”) was named as Ann in the museum’s posters and flyers, while she spelt her own name with the ‘e’ on the title labels and price tags.

Ann Mwiti is someone else. You can check her out on Google — there seem to be dozens of them, and for all I know some may be talented painters too.

There cannot be all that many Korean professors of art in Nairobi, so there is a fair chance that Eunju Nam and Nam Eunju are the same person. If they are not, it is difficult to tell which one is the better painter: Both are pretty dire.

Of the 32 of paintings on show, only three are in what you would call a normal colour scheme — blue sky, white clouds, green grass. The others have been skewed with a contrary palette of oranges and lemons, greens and pinks.

If the idea was a shot at Fauvism it works only up to a point. Matisse, Derain, the Englishman Matthew Smith and the rest of them used colour to create harmony.
Here instead of finding new insights through harmony I found only clichés, and shrill ones at that.

The reason that Fauvism lives is because even their most extreme colour combinations look natural. They open our eyes to what is before us.

Now we see colours where before we saw none. They enrich our lives with a new, exciting vision of our world.

Here the colours look forced as though Nam is copying the effect without the soul.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age.” Here we have something of the flower, but little of the force that drives it.

The Fauves underpinned their colours with rock solid drawing. And drawing, alas, is not this artist’s forte.

So what exactly are we looking at?

It is rather as though Nam painted while peering through a bright orange sweet wrapper. There are precedents for this. Monet painted while wearing blue tinted spectacles and analysts wiser than me believe that it might have affected his palette.

What is even more bizarre is that such an experienced artist as Nam should draw so badly. There are precedents for that as well, but moving swiftly on, why do so many of her figures look either etiolated, awkward and stiff, or like achondroplasic dwarves?

Her animals are not well served, either: The anatomy of her herd in Zebras, and of the elephants in her Baobab Malindi series, is disastrous. I would like to believe these are deliberate distortions for comic relief — post modernist quotations from Tingatinga painting, perhaps — but I fear they are just clumsy.

It is all very well meaning and perhaps even laudable — at least here is an artist willing to have a go and who clearly revels in being in Kenya — and some would find the colours stimulating.

The paintings that work by far the best for me are the three where a traditional palette and tonal values hold sway… clean little landscapes that pin down precisely the Kenyan country landscape.

It is baffling that an artist so able in one direction should be so slapdash in another.

What one can state with certainty is that at least these garish paintings are well hung, and might provide a flash of sunlight on a dull day.

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