Advertisement

Nocturne for a city — the music of life

Thursday March 26 2015
EAArtmagazinexc

Dashboard, by Stavros Pavlides. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY |

A city by night is an edgy place, reeking with the promise of pleasure but with that hefty side helping of danger that keeps you alert.

And even for a man who works in Brooklyn, Nairobi spells excitement.

The painter Stavros Pavlides, based in New York, took his camera out into the city at night and has worked from those images to produce a suite of nine paintings called Nairobi Nocturnes.

They are on show at the Kuona Trust off Likoni Road near State House, where Pavlides is the current artist in residence.

Prompted by what Pavlides calls “Nairobi’s ominous night time reputation” (how he describes New York is anyone’s guess) it is an atmospheric essay on his perceptions of city life.

The figures in most of the paintings are in movement, invariably blurred, and the backgrounds in every case but one, inevitably dark.

Advertisement

The colours of lights flash and flare, people duck and dive through traffic, or slink along an unmade road, or stand uneasily, framed by doorways, lit by street lamps.

Pavlides trained as an illustrator and like that great American painter of street life Norman Rockwell, he has a journalist’s eye for the detail that tells the story; he understands the importance of trivia.

One of his pictures, for instance is simply of a sign: “No guns allowed.” In another, Late Nighting, he captures the visual stutter of louvered windows quite brilliantly.

Unlike Rockwell however, Pavlides, rarely shows us night life in sharp focus. I suppose that is deliberate — the pictures are billed as “atmospheric” — but it does make it difficult to judge the range of his abilities. And “atmospheric” is a bit of an escape route, really.

Monet’s Le Gare du Nord is “atmospheric” but the detail is enchanting, the figures solid even when painted with a dab and a flicker.

Of course, I am not complaining that Pavlides, on a Kuona residency, is not as satisfactory a painter as Monet — that would be just plain silly — but I do point to the Monet as an example of how detail and solidity need not be sacrificed while capturing the sweep of a scene.

Pavlides gives us the overview and the loose brushwork (the shirt on Broken Road is rather well handled) but lacks depth in the detail.

And when he does bring his palette out of the shadows the result is not entirely what we — and he — might have hoped for. In Pink Bets his attempt at the description of the front of a betting shop called Palms is poorly handled. Frankly, most sign writers by the roadside could have done better.

He seems more secure in Passing Lights 1 and Passing Lights 2; two paintings hung as a diptych. They describe car lights seen as coloured bars shooting past the eyes, copied from a long camera exposure. A nice try, but this is something we have seen in most photographs of most cities.

In Dashboard, a street scene glimpsed through a car windscreen, the artist sets up an interesting contrast between the static cars caught in a jam and a hurrying, blurred figure dodging between them. The windscreen forms the frame.

Pavlides generally works at the intersection of photography and painting and is fascinated by cinema noir, urban themes generally and by Expressionism.

If his ideas occasionally exceed his ability to present them with clarity then he is certainly not alone. The problem is that in East Africa the discrepancy between idea and presentation is heightened, through absolutely no fault of Pavlides who has stumbled into someone else’s minefield.

That is because, for a brief inglorious while, incompetent execution became almost a cult and its effects — the uncritical acceptance of second-rate work and an unwillingness to judge it as such — are still with us.

Artists of some ability and of little were encouraged to paint, given small stipends, provided with materials, but banned from looking at works by international artists in case the purity of their vision became dissipated by influence… or to put it another way, in case they actually learnt to paint properly through exposure to example.

This was before the Net and given that glossy art magazines were expensive and beyond most artists’ reach, the ban was therefore relatively easy to enforce.
So artists developed — or rather failed to develop — in a vacuum and each became known for their own unsullied styles.

Happily that style — best described as colourfully naïve — was exactly what Western tourists and UN workers expected of carefree African artists, so much money was made and reputations grew.

The artists’ unique viewpoints coupled with natural genius apparently overcame their inability to draw so much as a straight line, or even a consistently curved one, come to think of it.

Never mind: Outsider insight is everything. We are lucky to have them with their happy splashy village scenes, moo cows and baa lambs, prophets and saints.
Great fun of course, but now the world has moved on and serious skills command a premium.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi.

Advertisement