It’s good to take a break now and then to recharge the batteries, particularly when you are an artist.

For art—excellent, meaningful art; art with a point and a purpose—is a career notorious for burning up creative energy, leaving you flat and lacking that vital spark.

So better to put down the brushes and turn to something else for a while, rather than become vacuous and trite.

Ehoodi Kichapi, now aged 37, knows the risk, fears the feeling and took the remedy in time.

One of the region’s more exciting artists with his painterly, boisterous canvases has stepped away from the easel to pursue his other great interest—the music of Francophone West Africa.

EXHIBITION

It was a natural move for him to get closer to the sounds of Mali and his hero Ali Farke Toure by studying the musicians’ language: French.

But while Kichapi goes back to school, his paintings live on in a solo exhibition at the new Stables Annex in the One-Off Gallery at Rosslyn to the west of Nairobi.

There, 18 of them, the most recent being from 2017, remind us what a fine artist he can be.

Among the riotous bulls, cows and donkeys that are his signature subjects, are a witty brown fish, a stunning motorcycle (called A Cool Bike) that shows an artist getting to the essence of his subject with a few telling strokes, plus a series of standing and seated figures.

They are seen at their best in Sitting Position I (African Woman) and Sitting Position II (African Woman), which give a nod to Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes with their disturbing authority and make me look forward to Kichapi’s return.

A fascinating contrast to his visceral attack can be seen in the older Loft gallery at the One-Off, where seven artists are showing 21 works on paper; or 23 if a triptych counts as three.

The only non-Kenyan among them is Lisa Milroy, a Vancouver-born painter who makes the commonplace special.

Her practice is centred on painting everyday objects—shoes, buttons, light bulbs and postage stamps among them—that she presents in formation often on plain white backgrounds, giving small objects a big presence.

By massing them in this way, her recurring motifs enable us to appreciate the beauty of things we often overlook or take for granted and increase their power to surprise, intrigue and delight.

UNDERSTATED

Here Milroy ups the stakes by taking something we already appreciate for its beauty, the humble but dazzling butterfly.

The six butterflies presented here — some are symphonies of radiant colour; others exercises in restraint—are not paintings but etchings.

For as a saxophone player often doubles on the flute, so painters love to print… Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso being handy instances of this trait.

It certainly helps that both as painter and printmaker Milroy has a brilliant eye for detail and technique to die for. Thus in one painting she offered last year in her first Kenya solo show at this gallery she caught the ethereal delicacy of steam rising from glass kettles. (Note to artists: Sounds simple. But try it.)

Not surprising then to discover that Milroy is head of graduate painting at the Slade, and an artist trustee of the Tate.

Her understated work is an object lesson in excellence and would repay a look by any artist.

Happily, showing in the same space are a couple of the region’s finest—Beatrice Wanjiku and Peterson Kamwathi.

Wanjiku shows three broadly similar heads under the title Silences of the Night. The painter (and printmaker) Walter Sickert remarked that an Englishman likes a tune he can whistle, so maybe that is why I prefer the most literal of Wanjiku’s dark visions in acrylic wash, Silences III.

Along the wall are two coloured drawings by Kamwathi, each showing a man flying like a flag what appears to be a shipping container, each container bearing the dotted route that migrants take; one across a map of the land, one across the seas.

They reference the migrants’ camp at Calais, nicknamed The Jungle, which housed its people in stacked containers.

Sub-titled Dance of the Flag, these drawings are perhaps ironic allusions to the fact that a flag is supposed to be a symbol of national pride, not shame.

UNCERTAINTY AND CHAOS

That growing talent Churchill Ongere continues his exploration of uncertainty and chaos with two deceptively sonorous floor-to-ceiling wall hangings (each 192x90cm), one showing a chair tumbling against a lattice and the other a couple of open boxes, representing boundless possibilities, in free fall.

Then there is that mixed media triptych by David Thuku, a rhythmic presentation of three portrait busts, while Thom Ogonga offers three typically big and bold woodcuts of women.

The upcoming painter and printmaker Wanjohi Maina shows us a couple of silkscreens of street vendors (a single image repeated like wallpaper) and two capable drawings, one of an ice cream seller and the other of a pavement sales pitch where he, like Milroy, finds inspiration in neatly laid out rows of shoes, slippers, boots and sandals. Around 100 of them at my count.

Repetition, repetition, repetition.