The Escape, 2019

John Silver Kimani  

 Let's let John Silver Kimani speak for himself:

"I am a Kenyan visual artist living in Nairobi.

I started painting at a young age and decided to become a professional artist. I was inspired by the artists from Banana Hill and the Ngecha region, where I later helped to set up the Banana Hill Art Studio with other local artists.

I create oil paintings and colour prints of woodblock prints that have found their way to exhibitions in Kenya, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Japan. Some of my pieces have been acquired mostly by private art collectors and enthusiasts from Kenya, Tanzania, India, Canada, Great Britain, the United States, Russia, Australia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.

With so many young Kenyans and visitors who have shown interest in visual arts as a career or hobby, it has become a passion to pass on my knowledge and skills to interested individuals - there are artists in all of us. I am especially pleased that by sharing knowledge and skills we have been able to build a community of visual artists among talented young Kenyans.

I am currently an artist at Kuona Trust Artist Center, Centre for Visual Arts in Kenya, where I spend most of my time in Studio 16, transforming my dreams and fantasies into the reality of textures and colours".

In 2015, John Silver Kimani was named best printer of the year by the Fei Art Museum in Yokohama, Japan, which is certainly a very special distinction in view of the centuries-old Japanese tradition of woodblock printing.

"Part of this award was a solo exhibition the following year," Silver recalls, who was also invited to another exhibition not far from Toyko. However, it could be that he is best known in the Netherlands. There, he was nicknamed "Africa's Hieronymus Bosch," since John Silver seems to have come from complicated, early surrealistic style of art inspired by Bosch.

Silver says he did not really know Bosch until some Dutch art lovers who invited him to exhibit his art in Amsterdam drew his attention to it. But when he arrived in Holland, he realized why he was named after one of the country's most popular painters.

For Silver, art is also fantastic. But unlike Bosch, who often interspersed his paintings with religious images and symbolic narratives, Silver's pictures are mainly a bizarre mixture of animals and people, drawn in an unreal way.

In this way he hybridizes his creatures and then mixes them in a counterintuitive way, which makes his prints and paintings so fascinating and complicated. Often it is not easy to see how an animal fits into the same shape as a human, or how Silver came up with hybrid creatures that look either like an ostrich crossed with a turtle, or like an elephant that is partly fish and partly dog.

All of his creatures look like they're just passing through, but that doesn't make them any less surreal and no less enchanting in the way they draw someone into Silver's sweet fantasies. All of this may have symbolic meaning, but you can't quite grasp it.

(Source: homepage of John Silver Kimani and explanations by Margaretta wa Gacheru)