The animal kingdom is naturally preoccupied with sexual attraction but in this bizarre contest to procreate, you can’t help but wonder if the human species takes it a tad too far. Men are completely fixated by their own muscles and the women obsessed with manicures and make-up.
Is our perception of beauty a construct or are certain human features inherently compelling? Observing our eccentric mating rituals, it is clear there are cultural filters on beauty and attraction. The fact that one person might be drawn to the rickety stick figure trembling down the catwalk, and another lured by the buxom senorita bursting from her garb, is quite possibly an effect of our upbringing.
Mary Ogembo’s current exhibition ‘African Beauty’ is showing at the Karen Country Club and features large oil paintings of women in traditional African attire. Ogembo’s women flaunt charming traits, some of which could fall in to the category of innate beauty and others, the realm of culturally concocted beauty. While the women’s natural hourglass figures are traditionally indicative of their childbearing potential, the African style dresses, heavy jewellery, cornrowed hair and hair wraps are accessories of our own devise.
Usually when women portray other women for an audience, they have an agenda of some kind, a creed or philosophy. Ogembo, who paints with a sense of ease and jest, says there is only one message here: Women are wonderful. With a celebratory spirit about her subject matter, she says that the big haired, big breasted, big bottomed women in her paintings are merely embracing their “African heritage.”
We probe Ogembo for just a little more, wanting to know how she selected her subject matter. “When deciding what to do, I chose to show African women in a good light, to reveal all of their beauty, even in the things they do. I didn’t want to focus on the negative, only the positive. I enjoy exaggerating their body parts to create disproportionate drawings. Now that my art training is over, I can do that,” she says.
For those who have not met Ogembo, they might imagine an immaculately dressed lady forever clad in a puffy dress and matching head scarf. Ogembo has an immaculate smile and is elegantly composed, but she doesn’t quite resemble the women in her paintings. Her hairstyle is short and understated. Her attire, completely unassuming. Working from the Nairobi GoDown Arts Centre since 2008, she spends most of her days in messy overalls.
Observing her large colourful works, her painting ‘Market Scene’ is an exquisite painting that stands out from the rest. With densely textured oil paint, etched in with a tiny knife, it is a semi-abstract crowd of women facing away from the viewer. Viscous swirls of paint in green, red, purple, ochre and electric blue float on a backdrop of sky-blue. Like warm sunlight, only hints of tangerine and rose glint through the sky. The churning globes of intense colour work extremely well on the heads of the African women in their traditional headdresses.
Other paintings reveal Ogembo’s sense of humour. ‘The Tool of the Trade’ features a seven-toothed, wooden African hair comb centred on a carrot coloured canvas. The title of the work pokes fun at how seriously we take the game of love and beauty. Another comedic image is Ogembo’s painting ‘African Heritage’ which features a woman’s gigantic, voluptuous buttocks in chokingly tight blue jeans accessorized by a beaded belt ringing around her microscopic waistline.
Ogembo tell us that she was one of the handful of artists who graduated with a Fine Arts Diploma from the former Creative Arts Centre and then moved on to work at the Kuona Trust Art Centre at the Nairobi National Museum in 1998. Her painting ‘Mother and Child’ at African Beauty, is a captivating abstract which she produced during that time.
Different from any of her other paintings at the exhibition, Mother and Child is executed in a minimalistic style. With clean curved lines to form bodies and circles for heads, the image is of an infant child in his mother’s embrace. With a harmonious blend of orange, yellow, white and a powerful vermillion red acrylic, Ogembo has produced a particularly striking image.
It is images like these and many other that have travelled to the far corners of the world. In Ogembo’s own travels however, she is particularly drawn to the African countries that have influenced her work, “Zambia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Egypt and so on,” she says.
Ogembo, who has won many awards including the Commonwealth Art & Crafts award (2005), and has been featured on CNN’s Inside Africa (2011), considers her career in the arts a success. “Art paid for my house and the education of my family members including my own children,” she says. Hopeful about the new era in Kenya where the arts scene is coming alive, she proudly shares that her daughter is currently studying film and animation at the Multimedia University of Kenya. Ogembo sees a bright future for dedicated artists in Kenya.
With a final glance at Ogembo’s paintings of African women, we make a last attempt to unravel the riddles of the nature-nurture debate around sexual attraction. Is it the women’s frocks or forms that hold our attention so long? In truth it is nothing but the naiveté; the light-hearted playfulness about Ogembo’s subject matter combined with our innocent preoccupation with the game of love and attraction.
African Beauty runs from February 26th to March 26th at Karen Country Club.