Lot 26

John Silver Kimani (Kenyan, born 1973)
Thoughts of My Heart, circa 1998
Signed ‘Silver John’ (lower mid-left)
Oil on canvas
56 x 42 cm
Provenance: Private collection
Sold KES 70,485

John Silver Kimani began painting at a young age and eventually decided to become a professional artist. He was inspired by the artists from Banana Hill and the Ngecha region, where he later helped to set up the Banana Hill Art Studio along with other local artists.

He creates oil paintings and colour prints of woodblock prints that have found their way to exhibitions in Kenya, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Japan. In 2015, John Silver Kimani was named best printer of the year by the Fei Art Museum in Yokohama, Japan, which is certainly a very special distinction in view of the centuries-old Japanese tradition of woodblock printing. In the Netherlands he has been nicknamed “Africa’s Hieronymus Bosch,” since John Silver seems to have come from complicated, early surrealistic style of art inspired by Bosch.

Silver says he did not really know Bosch until some Dutch art lovers who invited him to exhibit his art in Amsterdam drew his attention to it. But when he arrived in Holland, he realized why he was named after one of the country’s most popular painters. For Silver, art is also fantastic. But unlike Bosch, who often interspersed his paintings with religious images and symbolic narratives, Silver’s pictures are mainly a bizarre mixture of animals and people, drawn in an unreal way.

In this way he hybridizes his creatures and then mixes them in a counterintuitive way, which makes his prints and paintings so fascinating and complicated.