An African Harmony

Kenya Thu 16-08-2007

An African Harmony
By Maggie otieno

Caroline Mbirua and Yassir Ali both painters working at the Kuona Trust artists’ studios, the GoDown Arts Centre, in Nairobi’s Dunga road, have been showing their latest works at the Village Market exhibition hall.

The hall is located in one of the busiest shopping malls in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a location visited by many art lovers. It provided an ideal space for a large audience to experience the artists’ exhibition dubbed ‘African Harmony’.

‘An African Harmony’ a show supported by www.africancolours.com brought together a rich, intense blend of colour and texture with themes reflecting each artist’s fantasy and reality. Carol and Yassir paintings are all about colour and passion. The preferred theme for this show was colour, a reflection of the depth and experiences associated by many things African, from Carol Mbirua’s Maasai and landscape themes to Yassir Ali’s untitled themes inspired by Nubian culture.

Carol Mbirua, a graduate of the Creative Art centre in Nairobi has been painting the Maasai people since 1995. Carol’s work is heavily influenced by her neighborhood and the community of Kisamis in Kajiado district, an area inhabited by the Maasai.

With a combination of rough dry terrain and the constant red kanga of the Maasai, Carol has adopted these rich colours in her work and uses landscapes and abstract figures to articulate her imagination. Her landscapes are in red, ochre, blues and greens.

Here the artist uses bright leafless forests to suggest the conditions of the landscape. In another instance the artist’s theme changes to abstract figures disappearing in bright blue, green and red background depicting the inhabitants’ oneness with nature.

Yassir Ali, a Sudanese graduate from the Sudan University Science and technology, department of fine arts finds solace in colour. Yassir’s paintings are intense and full of texture dotted with patches of vibrant paint on an already bright canvas. His work in this exhibition is all about his memories of home.

‘I do not like confining my ideas to a subject. My art can speak for itself without me having to interpret it to anyone’ confirms Yassir, on why all his art works are untitled. Yassir’s work is loaded with colours of blue, red, ochre and orange. ‘These are the colours of the Nubian people and they occupy the subject in my works.

The exhibition which opened on the 2nd of August has just concluded at the Village market exhibition hall in Nairobi. The exhibition attracted a great number of people who were content to meet the artists buy their work and acknowledge that in a world of art there is a collective language called colour.

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