Harmony stunningly visualised in paintings

Long before he was ‘diagnosed’ by a fellow artist with a rare condition called synaesthesia (in which colours, sounds and shapes are somehow linked), James Mbuthia was painting with a bright rainbow palette.

He was producing art that was both playful and pastoral, somehow similar to the charming works that he’s currently exhibiting at One Off Gallery through mid-August.

But back in the 1990s when he finally became a full-time practising artist as well as a founder-member of the Banana Hill Art Studio, Mr Mbuthia knew nothing of synesthesia, he just knew he loved to paint, especially after working for several years at jobs that paid the bills but didn’t feed his soul.

He’d been trained in engineering and auto mechanics, worked in that field for some time. Then he opened up his own fruit and vegetable stand, however that too wasn’t his calling.

But taking a look at the 18 paintings that Mr Mbuthia has on display at One Off will leave one with little doubt that he was meant to become an artist and create art that reflects his commitment to a special kind of creativity—a kind that emulates a divine creator.

Mr Mbuthia is modest about his ministry, about his being an ordained Christian minister. But he’s happy to admit that his art is deeply influenced by his faith; also that his faith has given him a peace of mind that’s enabled him to paint the beauty of life that he sees surrounding him at his home and in his home area which is just near the ever-green tea plantations of Limuru.

Coincidentally, Mr Mbuthia was ordained the same year, 1996 that he sold his first painting and was then able to see the way forward to becoming a professional painter. That was also when he began to see the way his own spirituality could be expressed in his art.

Farm animals

Not that he paints pictures of priests and prophets, saints and sinners. Instead, his art reflects the beauty of ordinary people living their everyday lives; only that what he sees in his mind’s eye are everyday people living in harmony with nature and with their fellow human beings.

Not that Mr Mbuthia is unaware of the social, political and economic problems of the country and the world.
The artworks he exhibited at One Off gallery just before the 2013 General Elections conveyed his concerns about issues such as corruption and greed, particularly among politicians.

Granted he still created colourful, captivating paintings, but they were ones that covertly conveyed his social critique using subtle symbols like pigs and other farm animals.

In his current show, his art has a warmth, luminosity and energy that’s infused with love and affection— between mothers and daughters, young men and women, and even husbands and wives.

The affection extends to human activities as well, like dancing, making music and even reading, be it a letter or a library book.

How he paints

Painting layers upon layers of acrylic colours to achieve just the right hues, Mr Mbuthia says he starts a work by painting his whole canvas white. After that he’ll sweep across the canvas in undulating style, listening for the sounds that suggest which colours and shapes he needs to place on the canvas and where.

That kind of listening could just as easily be called inspiration as the clinical term synesthesia, but whatever one prefers to call the creative process, his paintings seems to increasingly get more luminous, colourful and captivating with every solo show he has.

Sound of silence

It was back in 2005 during an artists’ workshop at RaMoMa Museum that Mr Mbuthia encountered the idea of consciously creating art while listening to music. The workshop combined musicians and painters (like Tabitha wa Thuku, Martin Kamunyu, Beatrice Wanjiku and others) all of whom got inspired by the other artistic genre.

“It was an eye-opening experience for me,” said Mr Mbuthia, whose paintings are inspired by all sorts of sounds, everything from classical music to songs of birds and silence which he occasionally breaks by banging on ordinary household objects.

“I don’t complete a painting in a day,” he said, explaining how he has to stop if a sound is jarring or dissonant.
“I want to paint art that reflects the harmony that I see in nature.”

So he gets back to work when he feels a sense of peace that enables him to see how, for instance, the horizon never conflicts with the ground, the birds never go to war, and human beings have the capacity to celebrate life as they do in Mr Mbuthia’s art.