The Grass Is Singing

Kenya Mon 17-11-2008

The Grass Is Singing
By David Kaiza/Africancolours.com

At a certain hour late in the afternoon, during some seasons when the sky is clear, you notice it in the clouds and with colour red, it is unavoidable:

As an outsider seeing it the first time, the clarity of light in these high places of Kenya – including Nairobi – can be overwhelming. Red becomes redder than you have ever seen it. Yellows, oranges and blues radiate with such force that it is like teargas in the eyes.

“We normally have very good light in this world,” says veteran Kenyan painter, Timothy Brooke. “Best light in the world.”

The grass is singing by Timothy Brooke

^{The grass is singing}

Lying between 1700m – 2600m above sea level, they receive a quality of light so pure it seems at times like fantasy. Lower down at sea level areas like Mombasa, it is perhaps less the light you have on your mind and more the humidity you think of, and although red remains red, it is without the aggressive brilliance you will find up here.

The season breaks when the rains come in late September. You start to see the glow in the clouds. They force you to squint, bright and glowing as if they are radiating light from within.

Mr. Brooke did not make too much a point of this in his exhibition at the Rahimtullah Museum of Modern Art, RaMoMa in Nairobi. Somewhat circumspect about this phenomenon, he paints in a more subtle, if cozy palette. Browns intermix with rosy colours and ochres, though so very frequently a raw yellow or blue will break out here and there.

Yet his colours are applied rapidly, broadly. Think what the impact might have been had they received more attention, for in some of the pieces, it’s this rapid application of colour which prevents the subject from really coming out.

But his reds and yellows do not let down. They are Rift Valley-genuine. Call this exhibition a study of light and life: Blue-butted wildebeest wade in a field of ochre; the Aberdare ranges are a study in blue.

A lone topi stands on an ant-hill. Around him a lush, wide field is safari-invitingly open. Three other topis lie submerged in the grazing. It is on this painting more than the others that the magic of this light emerges with subtle power. Descending on the topi’s shoulder, like a brief coat, it lies central to the whole piece and once you have seen it, you start to see the entire piece again and the impact is to make you feel that you are under the sun yourself.

The areas that Brooke makes the subject of his paintings are some of the most majestic anywhere. It is the Eastern Rift Valley, Big Earth. And it is this subject that his collection of 31 canvases exhibited at RaMoMa from mid-October to early November rise up to capture.

Elephants by Timothy Brooke

^Elephants

“Gum trees give off a blue gas which is why the Aberdares looks blue,” he says, “These are the rain-making mountains,” he goes on.

With the temperature rising, he explains, the air in the valley heats up, rising along the escarpment as if funneled upwards. And the thermals – rising heat – will stagger light planes flying too low. The seasons are abrupt. He is capturing the rhythms of Big Earth. But he also gets small earth - the transient moments when a glint of light is caught on yellow-stemmed acacias; how morning light transforms a landscape and the shadows that radiate with cool brilliance.

His collection of paintings is first and foremost poetry, appreciation of wildlife, musings about passing seasons.et these attractive lands are as much the Kenyan Rift Valley as geography, as Rift Valley the political history. If they are attractive, then they are too attractive.

The scene this year of the post election violence, the Rift Valley has been much contested. Everyone wants to have a piece of it. The stories are long and sometimes hard to take in and in Brooke’s hand, this history is handled with immensely controlled subtlety, very easy to miss.

You don’t see this at all by looking at the paintings. It is the titles that tell it, particularly one, The Grass is Singing.

This painting is a touch more vivacious than the other mostly overcast paintings. Its colours are strong, the sky high. The effect of looking at it is to be calmed and settled. Like the rest of his paintings though, it narrates its observation from a level tone so any drama stands out stack, like what Brooke says of Doris Lessing’s novel about settler life in the former Rhodesia:

“I found that book so close to home,” he says as we stand looking at the canvas. “It was so painful to read. She is such a powerful writer. She writes very close to the bone.”

Camels by Timothy Brooke

^Camels

Now 65, Brooke was born in England and only came to Kenya as a child. Later as a young man, he went back to Europe – for a pilgrimage to learn about art because here “we were very short on music and art”. So when he came back, the power of these lands hit him once more. “I was haunted by everything; the Rift Valley, the animals, the dust.”

Beyond history and struggle and identity, it is the power of these vast lands that Brooke attempts to capture. It is Mt. Longonot, the peculiar mountain that sits on the Rift Valley floor so that as you drive along the escarpment, you look down at it.

It is the wildebeest which show how much Mr. Brooke has mastered forms. With a few brush strokes, he captures the oddness of their heads, flanks and bellies in their awkward gait. It is as if he is doing with his brush, what Hemingway did with his pen when he came to these high lands in his first Kenyan book, Green Hills of Africa.

It is the clouds he captures in the painting, Clouds over the Salient, as they come up behind hills. Whiter than white, it is their sheer dimension that is staggering. “Clouds as wide as cities,” he says. At full stretch, it is as if these clouds are exploding upwards and outwards.

His subject is the poetry as it is the allure of adventure of these enchanting lands. Clearly, there is a great deal of Hemingway in him as he so eagerly says “I have read all his books." He rephrases from Hemingway’s title and calls two paintings Across the River and into the Tea (From Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees). By and large, these are the subjects from the one single Hemingway book, the Green Hills of Africa.

Hence, embedded within these 31 views of a magnificent country is history and experience. Brooke’s titles hint at the changes Kenya finds herself amidst; “we are all in transition,” he says.

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