Two artists who love bold colours and African imagery exhibit works

Yassir Ali and John Kamicha have been buddies for almost a decade. They got together as studio mates at the GoDown Art Centre when Kuona Trust was still there.

Both painters who work with bright, bold colours and African imagery; both have a sense of their heritage. But their current exhibition at the Banana Hill Art Gallery is the first time the two have had an exhibition of their work together, not in a group show but just the two complimenting each other with their various styles, subject matter and technique.

Wildlife

Kamicha might be mistaken for a wildlife artist for, indeed, he paints all manner of creature that populates Kenyan game parks, everything from hyena, zebra and giraffe to vultures, skeletons, spiders and wasps.

Both artists favour mixed media and collage; both make abundant use of mitumba textiles, particularly those rich in design, fine detail and bold colour.

Yet where Yassir works kitenge designs into his backgrounds, often adding layers of paint to overlay and mute the bright mitumba hues, Kamicha blends the kitenge designs into the wildlife’s face and body, lending an eerie sense of beauty to otherwise odious creatures such as the hyena, vultures and even wasps.

It’s that twisted kind of contrast between the elegant and the odious that makes Kamicha much more than a traditional wildlife painter.

In fact, Kamicha’s work is anything but conventional. His message may be cryptic, but one has a sense that between predator and prey in the wild, his art focuses more on predators and scavengers rather than on those preyed upon.

Yassir’s art is more abstract and iconic than Kamicha’s, although both seem to paint in symbols, causing the viewer to suppose he’s not simply seeing pretty pictures but rather images having a deeper, more significant meaning.

Evocative

Yet one can’t avoid feeling Yassir’s art values beauty, balance and cultural depth more than Kamicha’s.

Not that they both don’t express a skilful sense of beauty, only that Kamicha has no problem blending the elegant and the ugly.

For instance, one of his paintings is filled with skeletons surrounded by scavengers who’ve obviously enjoyed a feast. It’s an evocative work of art wherein even the leafless tree on which the vultures perch is knurled and struggling to survive the dry wasteland of drought.

Coming from Sudan where he studied at the prestigious Khartoum University College of Fine and Applied Art, Yassir was a student of African history as well as a fine art major.

The artist himself explains that having a strong sense of his connection with the Nubian civilization is no surprise, given he grew up in northern Sudan where his home village was filled with literally hundreds of Nubi pyramidswhich were much smaller than those found in Egypt, but they both were built to house deceased nobility whose spirits were said to reside in those solid stone structures.

Symbols

Growing up visiting such impressive remnants of Nubian civilization had a profound impact on the artist. It’s especially evident in the assorted symbols seen in virtually all of his paintings, which are somehow similar to what he used to see when walking through the interiors of those pyramids as a young boy.

Noting that the Nubians were around long before the Egyptian civilization, Yassir admits having a deep-seated affinity for Nubi antiquity has given him the quiet sense of identity and self-assurance that comes from knowing who he is and where he comes from.

“I identify as an African, a Sudanese and a Nubian,” Yassir says. Having such a deep sense of his cultural roots has definitely inspired his art, which he says is meant to celebrate that early African civilisation.

One of nearly a dozen Sudanese artists who’ve migrated to Kenya since the early 1990s, Yassir believes that they all reflect an appreciation of that early African civilisation in their art.

His use of bright and beautiful colour combinations may give off a feeling that he merely creates intricate decorative paintings, not striking commemorative art that celebrates an indigenous African civilization that he feels all Africans can claim their own close connection to.