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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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Timothy Brooke Exhibition Invitation

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

Click thumbnail to enlarge and scroll through all images
SOLD - Migration - Oil on canvas - 100h x 120w cm
Soda - Oil on canvas - 51h x 96w cm
The Buffalo’s Tears - Oil on canvas - 100h x 120w cm
Timau Wheat Fields under the Mountain - Oil on canvas - 77h x 103w cm
River Stones - Oil on canvas - 66h x 99w cm
Rift Valley - Watercolour on paper - 48h x 49w cm
Head Lights - Bongo - Oil on canvas - 100h x 120w cm
Fever Tree III - Oil on canvas - 82h x 62w cm
Fever Tree II - Oil on canvas - 102h x 77w cm
The Mountain at Sunset - Oil on canvas - 82h x 99w cm
Fever Tree - Oil on canvas - 82h x 51w cm
Acacia & Euphorbia - Ink on paper - 54h x 69w cm
Aloes II - Oil on canvas - 51h x 66w cm
Before the Rain - Oil on canvas - 65h x 90w cm
Ethiopian Lady, Braided Hair, Beaded Cap - Oil on canvas - 60h x 40w cm
Harar Madonna - Oil on canvas - 81h x 61w cm
Mount Kenya - Watercolour on paper - 57h x 68w cm
Zebra VI - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 56h x 80w cm
SOLD - Noonday Sun - Graphite on paper - 74h x 104w cm
Hub - Oil on canvas - 61h x 82w cm
SOLD - Old Town Mombasa - Ink and graphite on paper - 59h x 50w cm
Zebra III - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 65h x 79w cm
Phalant - Oil on canvas - 52h x 100w cm
Zebra I - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 76h x 80w cm
SOLD - Sleeping Lions - Charcoal on paper - 74h x 104w cm
SOLD - Zebra II - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 65h x 79w cm
Tana Delta II - Watercolour on paper - 49h x 60w cm
Zebra V - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 59h x 76w cm
Trunk - Charcoal on paper - 74h x 104w cm
Zebra IV - Charcoal & pastel on paper - 59h x 76w cm
Windswept - Graphite on paper - 74h x 104w cm
Italic Bold Extended - Charcoal on paper - 74h x 104w cm
The Lion & the Unicorn - Charcoal & graphite on paper - 74h x 104w cm
The Dynamic - Charcoal on paper - 73.50h x 103.50w cm
River Crossing - Charcoal on paper - 74h x 104w cm
After the Flood - Oil on canvas - 81h x 97w cm
Ol Bolossat - Watercolour on paper - 49h x 60w cm
Lox - Oil on canvas - 51h x 96w cm
Siesta - Graphite on paper - 74h x 104w cm
Aloes I - Oil on canvas - 51h x 66w cm
Mother - Graphite and body colour - 70h x 56w cm
Mass - Charcoal on paper - 74h x 104w cm
SOLD - The River - Charcoal & graphite on paper - 74h x 104w cm
Forest Edge Tigoni - Oil on canvas - 69h x 91w cm
Tana Delta I - Watercolour on paper - 49h x 60w cm

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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  • Home
  • About
    • One Off
    • One Off Team
  • Artists
    • Exclusive Artists
    • Associated Artists
  • Exhibitions
    • Timothy Brooke Memorial Exhibition
    • At Artcaffe
    • About Sankara >
      • Sankara Exhibition Archive
    • Exhibition Archive
  • Sculpture Garden
  • Visit
  • Purchase
    • Collectors
  • Media
    • Press
    • Video - artists in their workspaces
    • Video Archive
  • Contact