GALLERIES: Women and wildlife in all shades of grey

Imagine the excitement when I received an e-mail from a friend asking me to open the attachment to see an illustrated version of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

With trembling fingers I prodded the keys and waited, trying not to breathe too heavily, to see revealed... a paint chart showing, as promised 50 shades of grey.

Oh ho ho, what an amusing friend I have. How we could have laughed all the way to casualty.

And so, it was a rather less hopeful me that found another e-mail in my inbox, advertising an art exhibition called Shades of Grey. Yeah, right. Caught like that before.
But no. It actually is taking place and is gallery director Lara Ray’s catchy (not at all desperate) way of trying to bring in the punters.

With the tag “Art in monochrome (and a hint of colour)” it has been on at her Polka Dot Gallery in Karen, Nairobi, for the past three weeks and will go on until June 4.

It features drawings with pencil and pen and ink, etchings and watercolours by more than a dozen artists — coincidentally, all but one of them women — offering an interesting range of techniques, subjects and styles, mostly in monochrome with the advertised occasional enlivening flash of colour.

One of those flashes, in shades of green, was the best work in the entire show — a small etching of a flying bug, by Oily Parish. There were three in all (the other two were grey) and they proved that patient observation of even the smallest things can bring great results. If one of the objects of art is to give new insights into the commonplace, Parish succeeded brilliantly.

Gallery director Ray showed she can draw, too, with a memorable little ink sketch of a pig bustling along, while regular exhibitor Sophie Walbeoffe showed a group of boats off Lamu with a characteristic dancing line, plus a show-stopping ink and wash drawing of an ostrich. It was huge (around half life-size) and Walbeoffe caught precisely both its typically mincing gait, so at odds with these birds’ speed and strength, and its explosion of feathers.

We came, we saw, we left

Elsewhere, there was nothing to offend and little to excite. Competence ruled. All was orderly and professional; whether the neat illustrations of Mercy Kagia, the slickly weighted rhinos of Suki Darnbrough — who also drew a whistling thorn so clinically that it robbed it of menace — or the reassuring charcoal portraits by Eveline Van De Griend.

We came, we saw, we left… longing for a little more rowdiness on the walls. Another exploding ostrich perhaps.

An antidote to the ordinary can be found only a few kilometres away at the Sankara Hotel in Nairobi’s Westlands, however, where the veteran painter Timothy Brooke is delighting visitors with a select show of some 14 oils on canvas plus a dazzling mixed media painting on paper.

This man can bring excitement to a blade of grass.

All these works capture the eye and demonstrate what an excellent, throw-away painter Brooke can be, but it was the piece on paper, called River Crossing, that moved me most.

Close to, it is simply a series of jagged slashes of thick black lines, almost brutal in their attack. Yet step back ,and the whole thing resolves beautifully into a herd of zebra crossing a river. It takes a lifetime to paint with such pananche, and that is exactly what it has taken Brooke.

All these paintings are of wildlife — “Done from the heart,” he said — and whether aerial views of plains game or an eye-level study of flamingos, they completely convince.

As though making footnotes to a long career, with minimal fuss and maximum effect, Brooke records, wet on wet, the slinking of a cheetah, the force of gazelles locking horns, and camels in a river of sand lit harshly by an unforgiving noonday sun.

An interesting week, especially when compared with the debacle at the National Museums of Kenya where the management first solicited and then with a squitter of squeaky bottoms panicked and cancelled an exhibition called Saying the Unspeakable, which they promised would be, “by artists who do not flinch from controversial issues.”

The artists gave them exactly what they asked for, and the only flinching came from the museum officials themselves. For that hopeless lot, no nudes was good news and the unclothed body was an unsuitable subject for the walls of their hallowed halls.

But where would art be without men and women who got their kit off and men and women who were there to record it?

As a way of touching our souls, painting the nude surely beats 50 shades of grey.