By FRANK WHALLEY
An adult hippo at top speed can reach 30kph; still some way from Usain Bolt’s fastest at 48kph but still plenty fast enough to catch the rest of us. Hippos look so dumpy and sweet, yet account for more deaths in Africa than any other animal. Odd then those youngsters at Hippo Point near Kisumu should spend their leisure hours chucking stones at them from the safety of the trees. The Vengeance of the Hippo can be a terrible thing. As a young man, Erick Omondi was among those idlers who passed time annoying hippos and now, sure enough, comes their revenge. For Omondi, now aged 30 and a sculptor at the Kuona Trust art centre in Nairobi has been commissioned to make two casts of a lifesize hippo for the Dutch Embassy. Why the Dutch want hippos, I cannot tell. I know there are many canals in Holland, but even so.
Be that as it may, as a student of Kevin Oduor, the master sculptor famed for the statue of Dedan Kimathi opposite the Hilton in Nairobi, and the lifesize Asante Cow made to flatter the vanities of a telcoms firm, Omondi was off to a good start. First you make an armature out of steel. Then you create the rough shape of the thing with chicken wire mesh. Next you drape the mesh in bandages soaked in plaster, and you are getting there. The final touches come with an overcoat of modelling clay. In go the details, the cracks in the skin, the marks of the bristles and the eyes. And finally, you create a mould in fibreglass then use that to produce the finished cold cast bronze. Simple, isn’t it? Find me a commission and I’ll knock one off myself. Or probably not. Because amid the technicalities, what is needed above all is a sculptor’s eye and the skills to translate the vision into three dimensions.
So before you get out the welding torch to tackle the armature you need a model to work from. And given that hippos have big teeth, uncertain tempers and can outrun us all, you make a little model — a maquette — in clay, homemade in his case from kaolin, hot wax and Vaseline. And that is exactly the stage Omondi is at now. He has, for sure, caught the improbable athleticism of the hippo by emphasising the length of its legs and by tilting the head sideways a little, which also hints at its agility. Nice work, with a touch of imagination and a lot of flair. The hippo-ette, at the stage you see it here, minus its teeth, has taken the artist some three days so far and he reckons the completed lifesize hippos will occupy him for a further five or six weeks. The good news for him is that people have been so taken with the 30cm long maquette, even at this unfinished stage, that they have placed orders for casts of it. And Omondi, like professional artists almost everywhere, has been happy to oblige, committing himself to producing a limited edition of 10.
You may know Omondi’s work already without realising it. He made the mugumo tree that stands in the History of Kenya hall at the National Museums. And like many East African artists, he works under a pseudonym, in his case Enricke Fernando. He is not sure of the reason for choosing that, other than, as he told me, “I just thought it sounded good.” So Omondi/Fernando works on into the night, his order book full and a fine future behind him. He is one of a number of Lakeside artists making names for themselves in Nairobi. Western is claimed to be an area of growing interest to collectors. The Little Art Gallery run by William Ndwiga last year opened a venue at the Mega City mall in Kisumu, specialising in the work of Western artists, and he recently set up a selection of them at the Village Market mall at Gigiri near the UN headquarters in Nairobi.
Showing the work of three of his artists — Willis Otieno, Edward Orato and Arick Ayoti — it was of 60 paintings, of which 14 sold and a further seven were reserved. If they are confirmed as sales that means one third sold of all works shown, a strike rate that would delight and hearten most art galleries. Of the paintings on show, I thought the most competent were by Otieno, the most colourful by Orato, and easily the most original by Ayoti. In particular, I liked his take on the Monopoly board game, called Nairopoly. The site to avoid landing on, the dearest of all, was the Norfolk Hotel at Ksh4,000 ($44) with the cheapest being the slums of Mathare and Kibera at Ksh100 ($1.1) a throw. The Utilities were represented by the Kenya Revenue Authority, a cynical punt priced at only Ksh200 ($2.2) — but for 10 times more at Ksh2,000 ($22) you could land on KPLC, properly Kenya Power and Lighting Co. but much loved by its unfortunate customers as Kenya Paraffin Lamps and Candles.
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/Hippo–hippo–hurrah-/-/434746/2630610/-/jmhoqnz/-/index.html
