Timothy Brooke 2018 Exhibition

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One Off is pleased to present​


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'Earth and Sky'
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Paintings by Timothy Brooke

oil, watercolour and graphics



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Private View:
Saturday, 26 May - Noon to 5pm
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Exhibition run: 26 May - 26 June 2018
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About the exhibition

Timothy Brooke, The Conservationist Painter. 

Timothy Brooke is one of Kenya's best known artists. Vibrant and spontaneous in style he paints in tectonic plates of vivid flat colour colliding with each other to create images as explosions of blurry drama. He is 76 now and has been painting all his life.

Born beside the wild, his passion for it speaks out in his painting. Anyone familiar with the great African Outdoors will have felt it's primal stirrings. Gazing out across the vastness, with focus at infinity and so too space, the perception of depth yields to a sense of the enormity of time slowing down; now at a standstill, an out-of-body moment in a 2-dimensional existential canvas wherein we find ourselves as merely fibres, a fraction of the whole; structural, essential even but tiny and anonymous, compressed into a microcosm of the fabric across which is rendered a picture too large to comprehend. As of a neuron, what of the brain can it understand?

Perhaps this flattening of complexity is what leads artists to this space and many occupy it. But what Timothy paints is Time, both fleeting and eternal and, for savants of the The Wild, spontaneously re-playable.

Voyage around the work of Timothy Brooke and you may notice time in a more familiar yet despairingly humanistic perspective. As Africa accelerates down it's path of 'progress', modernity and nature appear more awkwardly in each other's company. Colourful Borana women fetching water on their donkeys; Bajuni tribesmen with their camels, all a natural part of the Natural World. And ever present is the gnawing, visceral discomfort that here speaks a valediction and the creeping awareness of a cruel irony: The Artist, descendant of English stock; a Victorian head on an African heart and his Sitter: the tribesman driving cows to water through nebulous swirls of red dust; ardent naturalists of differing persuasion but equal passion; an odd yet noble couple converging hand-in-hand towards their own vanishing-point.

On a continent in transition that has seen, in a couple of generations, a demographic transformation from the palaeo-pastoralist roaming the plains to the neo-urbanite never having left the city, what are we to make of the work of Timothy Brooke? Are these postcards, nostalgic for an irredeemable past? Or is he an eco-diarist in the service of posterity, reminding us of the enormity of what shall surely be lost in the persistent recklessness of our complacency to our own ignorance and greed? Would not this loss be a scandal of neglect set squarely upon the shoulders of the current generation?

Thank you Timothy, keep on prodding us; and thanks for the daydream.
​Dominic Martin
One Off

Press

EastAfrican - 9-6-2018 - GALLERIES: Bringing reality into the room

Preview of Works

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Exhibition openings are usually on the last Saturday of every month, excluding December. The gallery remains open on Sundays allowing anyone who missed the opening to catch the exhibition the next day. Do join our mailing list so we can send you an invitation. 
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