Exprime-Toi is acrylic on canvas, painted in 2023. A woman sings into a microphone, a guitar in her hands. Nothing else happens in the frame, and nothing else needs to. The reason she is performing carries the painting.
In the video, Ndangi Bunga explains the work herself. Her subject is expression and what blocks it. Every person carries some fear and some timidity, she says, and the two sit on top of everything a person might otherwise say. She gave her figure a guitar because music is a trade that puts a person in front of an audience. There is no private version of it. That is her point about fear: it does not dissolve alone in a room. You lose it in front of other people, or you keep it. The woman in the painting stands at that threshold. Ndangi Bunga adds that she went through the same stage at the start of her own career, and that the painting comes out of that experience.
Ndangi Bunga builds her figures from line. The woman’s face, headwrap, and arms are drawn in curved parallel strokes of green and yellow that follow the body’s forms, closer to contour mapping than to shading. The background is line too, but angular: a labyrinth of zigzags and key patterns in the same palette on black. Figure and ground are made of one material, and she separates from it only by curvature. The exceptions are the guitar and the microphone, painted solid, in warm browns and grays. In a canvas where everything else dissolves into pattern, the tools of expression are the only stable objects.
That choice matches something else she says in the video. A person is always influenced by their surroundings, for better and for worse, and the woman here is made of the same lines as the field around her. What she holds is what pulls her out of it.
That is what this series is for. One work at a time, with the maker’s name attached and the maker’s account on record. More of Ndangi Bunga’s work is on her profile: Sarah Ndangi. For purchase inquiries, write to [email protected].