Geraldine's glorious swan song

Claiming her exhibition will be her swan song, Geraldine Robarts’ vibrant collection of over 100 oil paintings certainly doesn’t look like the former lecturer is getting set to say goodbye. She has been in the fertile field of fine art for years that she helped cultivate, first at Makerere University and then at Kenyatta University.

Instead, her show opening tonight at Village Market, entitled ‘‘Window to the Mind’’ reveals her passion for painting and her indefatigable energy as the 100-plus paintings were created this year.

What’s more, by opening up that window to the mind, she’s discovered infinite possibilities for putting her oil paints on everything from canvas, wood and paper to a giant palm leaf.

She has also put them on a photograph by the acclaimed Kenyan photographer Anthony Russell, whose lanky six-foot grey giraffe got an ‘extreme make-over’ from Geraldine, complete with a menagerie of leopard, cheetah, rhino, zebra, baboon, shaped in miniature and camouflaged among layers of jungle colours.

Abstract paintings

The collaborative creation between Anthony and Geraldine is just one of the many masterpieces in this show, which spans almost 60 years of her artistic career and which she segments into three chronological periods.

It was a wise choice to sub-divide her works into three mini-exhibitions because Geraldine has been an experimental artist from the outset.

So much so that one might find it hard to believe her early Van Gogh-like works were conceived by the same artist who painted gigantic blossoms on canvas in a vein somewhat similar to Georgia O’Keefe or that her abstract paintings in shades of blue aren’t inspired by photographs taken from high flying satellites snapping shots of celestial spheres.

The one constant in her work has been her preference for oil paints; but otherwise, her styles of creating range from naturalist and figurative to semi-abstract and surrealist to outright abstract art.

Her pieces have other worldly titles, such as the ‘Transcendental Collection’ (of 40 uncanny works of burnt canvas on canvas), ‘Heaven Sent’ (turquoise blue ocean-scapes) and Celestial Presence (my favourite).

Leaf shavings

The other common element that Geraldine’s included in her art since the 1970s at least is a mixture of three dimensional accoutrement selectively added to her art for special effects.

In her latest works she’s sprinkled everything from gold and silver leaf shavings, red and blue swaroski crystals to Maasai beads, soda bottle tops and even tiny industrial diamond chips which she found down south where the chips are treated like waste.

Her first forays into experimenting with mixed media possibly started in the 1970s when her conservation work for Kenyan wildlife got her involved with fundraising for Daisy Rothschild, the giraffe whose ‘droppings’ Geraldine got the bright idea to dry, cover in resin and then sell overseas as ‘Save Daisy Rothschild’ pendants.

They sold well! A few of those pebble-like droppings are in the exhibition, often side by side with the crystals, beads or diamond chips.

But if Geraldine’s experiments sound unorthodox, you should know the processes involved in her paintings are equally unconventional.

Work her magic

For instance, her ‘Transcendental Collection’ literally aims to dispense with materiality for the sake of working with a ‘higher’ medium.

That intention inspired the bright idea of tossing pieces of canvas into fire, letting them burn a bit and then throwing them into cold water.

Once the burnt canvas dried, she’d work her magic, leaving it to rest on another piece of white canvas and covering the whole concoction with transparent resin.

Then, when that dried, what remained was a fascinating piece of abstract art.

But fire is just one of the uncanny tools of Geraldine’s artistic trade. She also uses pangas (when displeased with a painting, but not prepared to throw it away) which she can use to slice canvas into pieces which she in turn will reuse in some other form.

She can even use a cement scrapper when, after painting over one work with another, she wants to see what will happen when she scraps some of the second layer off the first.

But however she achieves her artistic results, Geraldine’s experiments are liberating for young people with whom she shares and mentors whenever occasions arise.

“One should feel free to do anything with anything in art,” says the Grand Dame of mixed media. “I love to see how accidents can transmute into works of art.”