Heritage

Crossing cultural borders to create art depicting diverse Kenya

ART

“Political culture” by Melusine Towler at Shifteye Gallery. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

Melusine Towler could be the most cosmopolitan creative artist around right now, having lived everywhere from Caracas and Havana, Cuba to London, Budapest and now Nairobi where since 2004 she has stayed everywhere from Karen and Kisumu to Diani Beach and Buru Buru.

An artist who does not confine herself to any one art form, she’s adept in fashion, theatre set and interior design as well as costume construction, home renovation and even cookie baking.

But lately, she’s focused her attention on painting as one will see when you make it to Shifteye Gallery where her “Culture Collection” is up until January 25.

Her current show is very different from her first one where she exhibited abstract art in her “Raindrops Collection” at Purdy Arms in Karen. (Three unsold works from that show feature in her “Culture Collection”, having been cleverly painted over by the artist, thus lending an undercoat of texture to mixed media artworks.

Her current works are far more figurative but they also feature a touch of the surreal; that is, the people in her paintings are recognisable yet not quite realistic.

In one sense, her paintings also have an impressionistic edge in that they all seem to expose not just the artist’s keen impressions of each community that she’s spent time with.

They also reflect her feelings towards her subjects, be they the street children she’s seen in Kibera and Eastleigh, the politicians whose posturing is transparent in her paintings, the mamas (both rich and poor, rural and urban all interwined) or even the wazungu with whom she mingled while living in Karen.

In a sense, one could call Melusine’s art “anthropological” since it reflects her experience crossing cultural (and class) boundaries and passing freely from one local sub-culture to the next.

But then, she’s been making comparable transitions all her life. Having spent her early years in Latin America, she moved to UK from where she shifted back and forth to stay with her parents first in Havana, then in Budapest but always ending up back in school in UK where she studied both theatre and visual arts.