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ART: A brush with Brush both then and now

Friday June 21 2019
Art

The Dogs are Out, by Alan Githuku. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

By FRANK WHALLEY

Time was when you could not visit a mixed exhibition without coming across the distinctive paintings of Wanyu Brush.

With sinuous brushstrokes, his subjects — people and their places — emerged in triumph from a picture surface in which the paint piled up like clotted cream.

He was touted by his gallery, the now defunct Watatu, as one of the Big Three of the First Generation artists; the others being Jak Katarikawe and Sane Wadu… and like the Big Five they were promoted as something precious and wonderful.

CHANGING FASHIONS

Changing fashions and the rise of a generation that relies on formal skill as much as instinct, means our Big Three should also be promoted, like the Big Five, as in dire need of protection.

After the demise of the Watatu, while Wadu continued to exhibit, Katarikawe found few buyers and Brush pretty well dropped out of sight except for those collectors who found his work in the annual auctions of the Circle Art Agency.

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And it was there that a new, different Brush was seen.

Gone was the heavy impasto and the rich (and occasionally greasy) glow of oils on canvas; instead there were vivid washes of watercolour on paper.

But although the paint was thinner the attack was the same; energetic strokes that let the colours flood and splash where they would, with the drawing as loose as ever.

It was as though he were treating watercolour on paper as oils on canvas.

And now, in his current exhibition, Brush is back and this time treating oils on canvas as watercolour on paper. Gone is the succulent paint and instead there is a hot, bright palette with colours applied in brisk, thin washes; his subjects outlined and filled in rather than defined by wriggling lines of thick pigment straight from the tube.

These can be seen at the Village Market exhibition hall with 10 paintings, both in the new, more graphic style (Let’s Rejoice and Man and His Wives being the finest) and in his more popular painterly manner.

They are part of a joint exhibition called Then and Now, curated and organised by William Ndwiga of the resurgent Little Art Gallery.

THEN AND NOW

Then and Now is a grand and sweeping title that promises a magisterial overview of the regional art scene; unfortunately, a touch too grand and sweeping for this exhibition.

For shown alongside Brush are paintings by his former pupil Alan Githuka, the photo realist Clavers Odhiambo and one Richard Njogu Kuria who smashes vinyl records and sticks them onto his canvases of paintings of singers and other popular entertainers (Grace Jones being one).

We are told Brush and Githuka represent Then while the young Odhiambo and Kuria are Now, which if correct is worrying for the future of East African art.

Thankfully it is not correct.

Brush for instance, clearly has yet more to offer, as has Githuka — they should be Now — while Odhiambo’s images slavishly culled from photographs and Kuria’s backward looking excursion into some sort of proto-Dadaism hardly point towards a bright and experimental future. They are actually Then.

Happily, there are many artists who do represent the future — in Kenya those based at the One-Off, Circle and Red Hill galleries and in Uganda the Afriart Gallery stable being prominent among them — so we can excuse what we are seeing as what was available rather than any attempt at a definitive statement.

Unusually for East Africa, one of Alan Githuka’s 13 paintings is a small snow scene called Winter in Denmark while two others also feature white… both with Githuka’s typical blizzard of small faces that deal with migration and identity. Sadly, the one called Snow White showed me no dwarves.

Clavers Odhiambo’s eight paintings are meticulous, clever and mostly huge with his Kiko, a portrait of a man with a pipe, measuring 150x200cms; a scale that certainly makes you look twice. This artist’s debt to photography can be seen through fleeting expressions frozen for ever (as in Like a Phoenix and Captivated) or the distortion caused by a wide-angle lens (Bernard Binlin Dadie among others).

GIMMICK SEEKING A REASON

There is a skill aplenty here but I look forward to the day Odhiambo puts his formidable skills at the service of an original idea.

Richard Njogu Kuria’s pieces (there are seven of them) featuring smashed up vinyl records and their labels would appeal to people who like something a bit different but here the difference is achieved through what is branded as “deconstructive mixed media” — in fact the sort of nihilism that gave the Sixties a bad name.

It is a gimmick in search of a reason.

One of these works, Spirit Voices, an abstract pattern of the broken centres of the records, approaches a good idea but would have worked better had Kuria detached the labels to make his pattern; echoes of the voices’ beauty without the beast.

There again, I suppose that after smashing up his records for the other pieces he was left with the middle bits and decided he might as well do something creative with them.

And you can’t blame a man for trying.

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