From the Daily Nation Newspaper The debate on whether art can pay has been around for a long time and remains urgent in Kenya today.Many of our artists remain poor till death despite the few so-called celebrities driving around in big cars and wearing bling bling. The moneyed lot among our artists is very much a minority.
What does Contemporary Art of Africa really present? Invariably, one may find an online gallery of “glossy” photographs, depicting various diverse animals in a variety and multitude of settings and poses. To truly throw this into real African art and to remember the impressions seen whilst on an actual wildlife encounter in Africa, one often feels at one with the continent, if not connected deeply to the animal they see.
Every time any artist decides to make a painting, they have their own source of inspiration for a given subject, whether it be a realistic inspiration from real life memory or abstract subjects that they represent solely from their imagination. The world surrounding an artist influences what they paint. The mind of the artist is manifested through the paint and brush. Some look to paint abstractly on a political situation.
Ephrem Kouakou prefers to work while the world sleeps. The artist says that in the dead of night, absent the sound of any human voice or music, he can best hear the "spirits" talking.
By Eoghan Macguire, for CNN http://www.cnn.com/style/article/africa-art-kenya-auction/index.html ...this is the Circle Art auction in Nairobi, Kenya -- East Africa's only contemporary art auction.
At a time when values for some blue-chip contemporary artworks have fallen by a third from a year ago, collectors are finding pockets of strength in a surprising new art mecca—Africa.
That “Contemporary African Art” is a collecting category encompassing 54 countries, 1.1 billion people, over 2,000 spoken languages, multiple thousands of native tribes, and near equally split between the traditions of Islam and Christianity, surely presents a slew of problematics. Africa’s unity lies more in outsiders’ perceptions of geographic continuity. However, contemporary Africa, in all its pluralism, is also united by a seemingly unexpected entity (unexpected especially to those outsiders): art.