Yony Waite sitting on a tree sofa. PHOTO| MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
Nairobi National Museum’s Creativity Gallery has never looked quite so fine, fresh and fertile as it has since last weekend when Yony Waite put up her Into the Trees exhibition which opened last Sunday and runs through December.
Transforming the museum’s most spacious gallery into a transnational forest wasn’t a feat the founder of Gallery Watatu did alone.
It was she, of course, who vowed to paint all the walls of the gallery dark green, which is the colour she most frequently encountered while visiting the thick canopied forests near her family’s northern California home.
But even before she picked the paint, it was Creativity’s curator Lydia Galavu who got her the green light to do with the gallery as she pleased.
“We respect Yony tremendously and we wanted her to feel comfortable working with us,” said Lydia, alluding to the central role that Yony has played over the years in the development of contemporary art in Kenya.
That said, Yony had several of her friends help her coat all the gallery walls (and windows) in the deep green paint, which enhances her use not so much of greens but hues of black and white blends in her paintings.
“People sometime claim I don’t use colour in my art, but just look closely and you’ll find subtle blends of blues and other hues,” said the artist who admits it’s the light that’s even more important to her than her figurative impressions of trees.
Inspiration
Her affinity for light and dark (or chiaroscuro) got a big boost when she studied among master painters in Japan. But even before that, her mentors at the University of California, Berkeley were Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, both of whom were painters who had a profound impact on her; both alerted her to the importance of the chiaroscuro contrast but particularly the essential value of light.
The other one whose assistance has been invaluable to Yony is Carol Lees, the curator-managing director of One Off Gallery who not only brought in a lorry load of potted trees which she placed in strategic spots to enhance the effect upon one’s arrival at Yony’s exhibition of literary traveling “into the trees.’
Carol is also the one who hung the more than 50 oil paintings that Yony conceived both at her Athi River home and studio and at her family’s Northern California base.
Both sites have been a tremendous source of inspiration to the artist whose love of nature is exquisitely manifest in this rich assortment of trees which are often accompanied by wild creatures, be they wildebeest and giraffe in the Kenyan showcase of her art or birds, be they owls or high flying hawks which she regularly sighted as she sat for hours observing and painting her precious northern California trees.
One can’t help feeling Into the Trees could be Yony’s most soulful exhibition yet, since there’s clearly a contemplative, or shall I say ‘sacred’ dimension to her trees.
First of all, she’s been patiently preparing this exhibition cum installation for several years. (Some even suggest the show could be called a Retrospective).
Nonetheless, many are quite new works since she lost a number of her original tree paintings in the fire that consumed her Athi River studio two years ago.
Another reason her trees feel like semi-abstract expressions of her soul, hieroglyphs of the heart, is because Yony is a woman who has travelled and lived all over the world.
And while she is an American by birth, until she became a Kenyan citizen, she’s spent little time in the States.
The two spots where she has lived for any length of time are the two sites where she painted her trees. It’s as if the trees mark the spots on her psychic map where she did more than just pitch a tent and paint.
Recognition
Meanwhile, Alliance Francaise just exhibited a dazzling display by 15 Coastal artists, including John Solly Salava, Hassan Athman and Paolo Franche among others. It’s a show that got underway right when the Art Auction was happening and the Kenya Art Fair opened as well.
It was an important collection that reminded us of just how many talented Kenyans are working outside Nairobi but who rarely get the recognition they deserve.
Finally, last Tuesday, an exhibition of paintings by Longinos Nagila entitled Silent Conversation opened at the Italian Institute of Culture.
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