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The name seems to be very appropriate. A Història do Viajante. The story of a traveller. Travelling by means of flavours, where a Japanese market meets and melts with a local orchard. But also the result of the chef’s own travels, from California to New York, from native Portugal to Japan, eventually landing in London.

Launched two weeks ago in the context of the stylish Bethnal Green Town Hall Hotel & Apartments just off the Cambridge Heath Road, the interior has been tastefully decorated with Scandinavian furniture and by the time you are sipping a cocktail before the meal you are ready to embark on a culinary experience which has few comparisons in London. Serving exclusively surprise set menus (but you have the option to choose the number of courses), the chef guides you in a journey that is made of colour, texture, temperature and of course taste.

The apparent beauty of the dishes – some resembling an Abstract Expressionist painting, almost as if the imaginary roving traveller also included a stop at the MoMA to contemplate Franz Kline – is just one component and is not glamorous colourful appearance to compensate a lack in the substance. Instead, under the skilfully presented form, lies a layer of combinations of textures that renders Mendes’ food so interesting. Mixing and juxtaposing solid, creamy, granular; powder, puree, broth, mousse. “I want my food to surprise and delight my guests. It’s not about being shocking, but it is about being playful” says the chef. This sensory experience also involves temperature, with an intriguing use of granita both in the first course as well as in the dessert, granita being clearly an interesting element both in terms of texture and in terms of temperature. Last but not least, the taste. “Each ingredient should taste as perfect as it possibly can” says Nuno and the vegetable course that was presented as the “spring garden” was so fresh that it epitomized his belief perfectly. The journey is completed by almost crafted amuse-bouche, sorbet (lemon and Thai basil, just excellent) and optional wine pairing including selections from small vineyards.

Food experiences of such level can sometimes be daunting or excessive or insanely expensive. But Viajante is all about being intrigued by the food and the atmosphere is refined but most of all relaxed. From the open-air kitchen, the chef supervises his project conceived carefully and passionately (“I have devoted the last two years to Viajante, to planning and experimenting with each dish, each menu”) and he himself is a pivotal element in the success of the restaurant. Far more talented than other popular chefs, Nuno Mendes strikes for his modesty. This inevitably reflects in his direct creation, his food, which is so much more enjoyable and interesting because it is not perceived as pretentious, despite its sophistication.

Trained at the California Culinary Academy, with a CV which includes experiences at Jean-Georges in New York City and El Bulli, Nuno Mendes’ first London-based project was Bacchus, a converted Victorian pub in Hoxton in which he amazed his clients with sous vide food, with the ingredients sealed in vacuum and cooked in a water bath with carefully (to the 0.5°C) controlled  temperature. Then he moved (towards Dalston, so not very far) on to an exciting private dining project, The Loft, in which a spectacular tasting menu can be enjoyed in the intimacy of a private apartment by a maximum of twelve people (incidentally, the project is still running in the form of collaboration with other chefs). Finally, he opened Viajante, without abandoning the East End. In fact he says: “The East End is the place I now call home”.

Home. A strange feeling for a viajante, a wanderer. But sometimes it can just be the intimacy of four people around a table, the conviviality. Sometimes a flavour. Sometimes the memory of that flavour – la madeleine de Proust – while the mind keeps travelling.

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The novel consists of a series of letters and notes exchanged mostly between the central character, Juliet, and others over the course of a few months in 1946. Juliet is a successful authoress in her early thirties, living in the gloominess of the bombarded post-war London, feeling rather restless, seeking for love, lacking inspiration and subconsciously longing for a fresh start in life. A member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society comes across a second-hand book once owned by Juliet and writes to her a rather reserved but extremely dignified letter to ask if she could help him get hold of more material from the same author. She is a fresh, completely unpretentious and cheerful correspondent, encouraging replies and more correspondence from the people of Guernsey. Mostly farmers and fishermen and feeling quite isolated from the rest of the world, the islanders are simply thrilled to discover someone so uncondenscending to whom they can express, in the most delightful and candid way, their strong opinions about books, authors and every other matter conceivable. Juliet soon uncovers, piece by piece, a fascinating story and makes a life-changing visit to Guernsey to learn more and meet her new friends.

Apart from the immediate sense of exhilaration, the element that drew and locked my attention to this book in the long term was the ingenious way the narrative spotlight is passed from one character to the other. Depending on the sender of the letter, there is an amusing change of storytelling style and pace, page after page. Even letters by correspondents frugal in their use of words are complemented by information dispersed in other letters, so that the need for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps never feels arduous. The epistolary style of the novel combined with the fact that the presence of books is so prominent everywhere has certain similarities to 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff: all correspondents – whether authors, publishers or readers – have in common their fondness of books and they form friendships through letter-writing that was initiated by literary enquiries. Compared to other books about books, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society might not be as autobiographical as 84 Charing Cross Road, nor as hysterically funny and surreal as the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, nor as heartbreaking as the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, but it combines just the right dose of all these ingredients into one lovely book.

As I was reading through, I could not get The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald B Edwards out of my mind. That is not simply because both storylines concern the Island of Guernsey while it was under German Occupation, although the prominent sense of historical background and geographical location in both books undoubtedly triggered the connection. It is mainly because the picturesque Guernsey that emerges from the pages of G. Edwards, could not be any more perfect in its provinciality, insularity and superb detail, as the natural habitat of the Guernsey people we meet in the pages of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It is very easy to imagine Ebenezer and the other members of the Literary Society being neighbours, quarrelling in loud Guernsey patois, gathering after curfew to listen to the wireless and deceiving the Germans in every way imaginable. In addition, the characters in both books are presented to the reader in similar detailed plainness, which, at some subliminal level, strengthens the associations made between them. Ebenezer, being an old fisherman who has spent all his life on the island, could not have anything but a raw and blunt narrative style as he recounts his life’s story, despite his unambiguous astuteness. Similarly, linguistic ornaments in the letters written to Juliet by members of the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society would be out of place. To this effect, the wonderful prose of M. Shaffer and A. Barrows immensely strengthens the credibility of the letters. In fact it is thanks to the prose, that the detail in which the characters are defined is not in the least restrained by the fact that the story is told via letters only. A few, carefully-selected words are enough to provide a vivid picture of each Guernsey correspondent, even when they do not write about themselves, but rather about village news and gossip. The authors have succeeded in everybody’s unrefined and natural way of speaking almost literally be vocalised through their letters.

All in all, a book highly recommend to everyone with a love for books and reading. A splendid leisure book, that will both entertain and stimulate thoughts.

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There is a limited quantity available every day but you can try and place an order here.

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Ukoo Flani are rough, brutal and extremely powerful on stage. Kenya’s answer to the Wu Tang Clan have an incredible charisma and stage presence, coupled with enough self-assured confidence needed to take the Kenyan music industry by storm. Sung in a mixture of Kiswahili, the slang Sheng and the occasional verse sung in English by the recently returned from America Richie Rich, the first Ukoo Flani album is called Kabisa (Without a Doubt) and it really packs a punch.

Those of us not too familiar with Kiswahili are probably left wondering what the hell they’re on about but it is clear that they’re not simply rapping about pimps, guns and bitches. Their style combines funky hip hop beats with dark, synthy baselines and the occasional ragga sonority, while each of the band’s seven different members contributes his own unique lyrical style.

Kabisa canot yet be bought online but for a preview of some of the tracks contained in the album head to the band’s myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/ukooflani

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Looking at your paintings, it appears that light is a major preoccupation in your work. How do you approach light?
The most difficult question first! In fact, when I’m at work painting, the thought of ‘light’ as such never enters my head. There are just different pigments which I put on the canvas to make the figures and the environment in my image look the way they need to look – that’s how I approach it – and some of those combinations of pigments happen to be lighter, some darker. (I wonder if this is the kind of Cezanne meant when he said ‘For the painter, there is no such thing as light.’) And yet of course when I stand back and look at what I’ve done, what stays in the mind is the light. I realize that I’m typically drawn to scenes where low-angled sunlight jangles against strong artificial light, and for that very reason I try to break my own habit, avoid my own clichés – do scenes where the light is very muted; where it’s all artificial; or where it’s high in the sky and purely natural. One canvas just has sunlight falling from a window in the ceiling into a room where four men sit with their eyes closed. And thinking of that, the best way I can express my sense of how this theme operates in painting is to get paradoxical and to say that light is natural metaphysics. It is a physical load of pigment with certain optical properties, and equally it is nothing less than understanding and grace.

In terms of light, you have written an essay on Pierre Bonnard – has his representation of light (and light on the human skin) influenced you?
I first got a job to write about Bonnard in 1994, when I knew very little about him except that I liked him – I’d never seen a big show of his work. I’d already been painting for twenty years plus, so I guess my mindset was already basically formed. I think the things that Bonnard is trying to represent – the things he is trying to get an equivalent for – are chords or resonances within his own memory, he is two steps removed from the physical hue of the object. Whereas I’m the kind of painter who is always naively trying to match the pigment to the object’s immediate colour, you see me holding up a loaded brush or palette knife before a scene to check the correspondence and ‘get it right’. ‘Get it right’ in quotes of course, because the end results are not factual, they’re imaginative, even as Bonnard’s are. But the approach does remain fundamentally different.

Human beings, the interaction with the crowd and the surroundings, the human figure – these also appear to be important in your work
Yes, that is what I am mostly thinking about when I’m making the pictures – rather than ‘light’, per se. My general theme is how human beings occupy environments, occupy different types of space. Or I could turn that upside down by saying, what concerns me is that  a rectangular picture has got to have something in it, something that’s not simply coextensive with it, and that entity is generally going to be an analogue for myself or things of a similar nature, i.e. a figure, one way or another. Many of the present collection of pictures have become crowd-filled, as you say. Partly because I had the use of a big studio and thought I’d take the chance to try painting some big canvases – but more deeply because the artist I’ve always looked up to most is Bruegel, and I’ve always longed to imitate his panoramic sociological approach to humanity.

In terms of figurative art, can you comment the following statement by Richard Wollheim: “When the Impressionists tried to teach us to look at paintings as though we were looking at nature [...] this was because they themselves had first looked at nature in a way they had learnt from looking at paintings”?
That would apply to all attempts at naturalistic painting. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Here’s Fan Kuan worrying over the same issue a thousand years ago:  ‘My predecessors [in landscape painting] always found their own methods in natural phenomena. So for me to take those other artists as my teachers cannot compare with learning from natural phenomena. And it would be better still, if I were to learn from my inner self rather than from natural phenomena.’  – And in fact that’s what the Impressionists thought, that they were injecting inner self – sensation, the flux of immediate passing experience – into the representation of landscape scenes. But there was an extra party in the dialogue by the time they were working – the camera. They were trying to supersede photography or at least to distinguish its remit from painting’s. For me, inevitably, photographs are a fundamental given of the situation. But I use them chiefly thus: I search through other people’s photographs for suggestions or cues or reminders, telling me about the various configurations in which people and their environments appear in the world. I then draw and draw and draw on the basis of those photographically supplied cues, until I have a picture that represents what’s out there in the world in my own expressive language.

Your grandparents were art critic Clive Bell and painter Vanessa Bell: how much are you influenced by your family’s legacy in your painting and writing?
For the most part, very indirectly, I think. Because my father Quentin Bell – their son – reacted against their English versions of modernist art with a personal artistic stance you could almost call post-modernist (except that this was in the 1940s) – he explored a fascination with pre-modern craft traditions, at the same time he explicitly admitted there was something absurd and anachronistic  in doing so. He mostly did pottery and illustration, but I’ve taken that attitude of his over into painting. My painting is interested in things I think of as pre-modern, like narrative and naturalistic values. But maybe those are mad concerns for a contemporary painter to have? And so the paintings mock themselves a bit. Many in the current exhibition have clown-like protagonists. I’m very fond of Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s art, but I don’t identify with it at all. One thing, though, that maybe runs through the generations of the family is a belief that paintings are largely to do with pleasure, and if a painting gives pleasure, that is an entirely satisfying reason for it to exist.

Is it correct to say that your approach to art history in Mirror of the world is based more on seeing art as the tangible product of the human creative process rather than an abstract aesthetic concept?
Well, I’m only interested in the concept of ‘art’ in a very peripheral way, as a theme that occasionally stimulates people to make interesting objects. Fascinating objects and how people made them and what those people were like and what they felt the world was like, those are the things that matter to me. I do tend to think of aesthetics as a thin, dodgy, not very convincing branch of philosophy, even when it’s got the intellectual weight of Hegel behind it, or the elegance of Croce.

Art and innovation (and this constant idea of seeing something “new”, making something “new”): but is it possible to reinvent the wheel in art?
This is what I’ve been saying about my own painting earlier, that it is trying to reinvent the cart-wheels of narrative and naturalism long after transport has moved on to… air travel, or something. It’s crazy. Yet painting is a business where being naive does make sense, I believe. In one sense you’re always bound to be doing something new, for better or worse, in another you are in the same position as every other artist in history, and ‘We have learnt nothing’, as Picasso said when he visited Lascaux.

As an artist, how do you relate to the art market, its changes and the idea of art as a commodity?
I have no problem at all with the idea of my pictures as commodities – I want them to be bought and to hang in other people’s rooms. It’s true that I don’t want them to be bought and get stacked in a storeroom as investments – but is that much worse than them lying stacked and unseen in my studio? The art market is a crazy system, sure, but also a very big and complex one. The fact that some mega-wheeler-dealer like Hirst dominates the media image of it doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of niches and corridors available for completely different acts, such as mine, to operate commercially also. One might wish that the media representation of what artists are up to wasn’t so monopolistic and narrow – but that’s where something like The Tamarind comes in, isn’t it? 

Francis Kyle Gallery
9 Maddox Street
W1S 2QE London
www.franciskylegallery.com

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The setting is Milano. Not the capital of fashion, but something softer: Milano covered in snow, seen from the top. The family is uniting around the dining table for the birthday of the patriarch (the first of many parallels with Visconti, as in the opening of La caduta degli dei). Everyone is present: the charismatic and respected patriarch holding the keys to the family’s fortune, a much uninspiring natural heir, the young promise of a successful grandson, the foreign woman with a soothing accent and a naturally refined deportment, the glamorous lady who seems not to remember that her youth has long gone, a granddaughter questioning her sexuality, various extras, the faithful housekeeper, a number of servants. It is a microcosm, with a set of rules and a set of mores, with a very specific language mostly unintelligible for or easily misunderstood by the outsider, with their “totems and taboos”: the works of art on the walls (Morandi, Campigli, Sironi), hidden rivalries, dormant desires. Then, as in the most respected tradition of drama, an element of conflict enters the secluded world of the golden dynasty. The plot evolves, in the streets of Milano and in the rooms of the villa, in the Ligurian hinterland and in the City of London, but it is tinged with tragedy.

Luca Guadagnino has written and directed a very dense movie. An ambitious project conceived together with his lead actress, the enigmatic, commonly-known androgynous but here incredibly feminine Academy award winner Tilda Swinton. Muse for Derek Jarman and reincarnation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Swinton plays the beautiful Russian married into the wealthy Recchi family. Emma (Bovary?) speaks an exotic Italian and, meaningfully, Russian with her eldest son. Naturally elegant and controlled, she radiates her Russian heritage through an underling agitation. Alongside Swinton, an Italian cast (Edoardo Gabbriellini, Flavio Parenti, Alba Rohrwacher) with a showy Marisa Berenson playing Rori, Emma’s mother-in-law. But it is not “just” the director and his actors contributing to the accomplishment of the movie. Guadagnino was aided in the script writing process by three well-known Italian authors (Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo and Walter Fasano). The photography has been cleverly entrusted to Yorick Le Saux, who has extensively worked with François Ozon in the past. The costumes have been specifically designed by Raf Simons (Jil Sander) for Tilda Swinton and jewels have been provided by Damiani. The setting itself has a prestigious history: Villa Necchi Campiglio (today a museum) was designed by the architect Piero Portaluppi for the Necchi family and is a very fine example of 1930s architecture, with sleek lines, linear rosewood bookcases, sliding doors, a heated swimming-pool and housing a collection of modern Italian art. In the tradition of Visconti, every detail has been tastefully studied.

The parallel with Visconti is not limited to the opening scene and to the attention for details. Tilda Swinton on the top of the Dome brings to mind iconic imagery from Rocco e i suoi fratelli (of course in a very different context). Music has a central role in the movie (an opulent soundtrack by John Adams) just as Wagner is crucial in Ludwig or Mahler accompanies memorable sequences of Morte a Venezia. Family dynamics and the elegant setting (with a hint, or more than just a hint, of decadence) are at the core of most of Visconti’s oeuvre. Marisa Berenson herself (granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli) was part of the cast of Morte a Venezia. But comparisons can be diminishing, to the detriment of a work’s originality. A homage is particularly effective when it is involuntary. The difference between a lesson absorbed and reinterpreted and a poem mechanically recited by heart, just as a true natural heir is not mimicking a legacy but is effortlessly enacting it.

This is a cultivated movie, just like someone who is used to populate his reasoning with citations. Madame Bovary and De Chirico are part of the lexicon. So is Andrea Chenier by Umberto Giordano, whose aria La mamma morta provides the title of the movie, Io sono l’amore, by means of an indirect citation (the famous sequence of Philadelphia in which a terminally ill Tom Hanks translates the Italian text into English to an astonished Denzel Washington). Just like a reflection in a mirror, something Visconti was very fond of.

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IDP Camp

The white tarpaulins donated by the UNHCR are not made to withstand the toll of time. As rips and holes begin to appear in the fabric of the plastic sheeting, they are progressively sealed together by bags, potato sacks, or whatever else is at hand. Some of the tents appear to be sturdier than others and an odd Canadian tent occasionally peeks out from a plot, maybe a donation from a charitable individual or a testament to a family’s better times.

It’s mid-morning at the Nakuru Pipe Settlement, a temporary camp set up for people who were displaced by the post-election violence in early 2008. There are only a couple tiny shops serving the thousand plus people here and most of the youth seem to be congregated in the pool tent, shooting holes without so much as a few bob in their pockets to buy themselves a beer or a soda. The bitter taste of unemployment hangs deep in the air.

“Where is the government?” they lament “why won’t others help us out of an existence we were forced into without any warning? What good is my right to vote if it only brought me misery, hunger and displacement?”

The sense of dejection is palpable throughout the camp. The self-help mechanisms put in place by the chronically poor have not been established here. Until two years ago most of these people enjoyed the comfort of a roof, four walls and some form of employment that saw their families fed and clothed.

The shock, the sense of injustice at their predicament has left them listless.

The best they say they can hope for is to soon find some better materials with which to fortify their waterlogged homes. They own this land now, although who has exactly what is not clear and they hold no legal title to sell their individual plots.

Mathare

The sun is setting on the tin roofs of Nairobi’s Mathare and the shadows are lengthening in the thoroughfares of the slum. A man with a knife sharpener made out of a bicycle wheel is busy tending to the last customers of the day, women walk down the path with bags of sukuma wiki (literally: “push up weekly”) and ugali in their hands and the children scamper around pushing little cars made out of plastic cola bottles and tops near a dirty sewage stream that  that flows to the bottom of the settlement.

At the bottom of the valley runs a murky little river where people are busy distilling chang’aa, homebrewed liquor similar to South Africa’s moonshine.  I’m told the substance is initially fermented in large barrels inside people’s shacks. The ingredients that make up each special recipe are secret but one can expect anything from vegetable peelings, marijuana stalks and human faeces. When the fermentation has finished its course, it gets transported down to the river where the distilling stations are awaiting.

Al[1], the genial, eccentric, excitable and ebullient architect, is surveying the scene from up on the hill. As he indicates different points of interest in the surrounding slum, he looks like a lord who is standing above his own personal fiefdom, proudly observing the movements of his villagers.

We walk over to a nearby shack and find Lucas hooking up a coat hanger to a wire on an electricity pole outside the door. Inside a light bulb starts shining brightly and the television splutters to life.

We are ushered in and a bag full a Kenyan-style pre rolled joints is pulled out. Everyone is handed one. As I light the thin, tightly rolled cigarette, a skinny cat slinks in and plonks itself on the armrest of my threadbare armchair.

The men are talking a mixture of Kiswahili and English and by the sounds of it plans are being discussed. The man in charge of Mathare’s newly established waste disposal program walks in and perches on the bed. Al says something to him and hands him a few thousand shillings.

A couple of barefoot children appear at the door. They smile at me and say hi but do not seem overly surprised by the presence of a Muzungu (white person) in their midst.

We watch al Jazeera on the crackling screen as the men wrap up their discussion. Then Al and I head back towards the road to catch a Matatu. We go our separate ways at the busy Ngara intersection, where a booming evening market that specialises in women’s underwear has sprung up. As I walk I clutch my cotton bag tightly to my chest – the international symbol for: “foreigner is afraid to get her bag snatched and probably has valuables on her too”

Gashie

Gashie is only a short ride from Gigiri, the neighbourhood that houses most of Nairobi’s UN buildings. I had originally assumed that it was part of the city’s periphery but John told me that it was I fact a village unto itself.

The compound that John, his wife Sephora and the three children in their care live in, is on the opposite side of the road from a little hospital. The tarmac peters out a couple of kilometres before the town begins and the road is made of compressed, dark red earth. Lush green vegetation seems clamouring to get out in a battle for ground with the humanity encroaching on all sides. The late afternoon sky is a deep blue and peppered with fluffy white clouds.

We duck through the low iron door in the brown gate, into a pleasant enclosure made up of a wide-open space and two rows of neat wood shacks with corrugated iron roofs. An avocado has branches that extend far over one of the rows of shacks. I imagine how the avocados must resonate as they rain down on the iron roofs at night. On the far corner of the compound next to the landlord’s squat grey house, a mango tree stands tall.

A small child runs towards me and wraps her arms around me in a hug. John, who is 24, tells me it’s his five-year-old daughter. The girl doesn’t look a day above three.

Sephora is standing by the door to their shack. Their youngest, Joy, is strapped to her back by a worn yellow and blue kanga. She flashes a wide smile at me, revealing two rows of straight, white teeth. “Karibu!” she says and ushers me into their single room.

I am entirely entranced by Sephora’s unassuming beauty and wonder to myself how a country bumpkin like John managed to bags himself such a pretty city girl.

Inside the television is showing a Philippino sitcom. It looks quite fun, although it’s hard to get used to the dubbed American voices. Blessed, the five year old and her equally petite cousin Shanique, run into the room and jump up onto the sofa so that they can touch my short crop of straight hair.

I get the impression there aren’t many muzungu who drop in for a cup of tea round here. Poor they may be but people for the most have steady jobs here and no one is going hungry. This is not the kind of community to whom development practitioners come rushing to the rescue.

John is applying to study Development at the University of Nairobi. He says he knows that working for an NGO will not make him much money but that he wants to do it because, in his words, he wants to “bridge the bad gap our fathers have created so as not to pass it on to the next generation”.

John also aspires to living in a house with gas and running water and possibly to have a separate bedroom in which him and Sephora can enjoy the benefits of married life without three little ones in the bed with them.

As I am leaving a few hours later, Sephora lowers her head and starts reciting a prayer for me, thanking the lord that he has brought me to them. I can feel the heat of my cheeks, as they turn red with embarrassment.

Great Rift Valley Lodge

“Baridi! Baridi!” squeal the excited children as they come off the slide into the pool’s ice-cold water. All around are well-dressed groups of Kenyan youth, chatting to each other and making like teenagers across the world.

Baridi means cold in Kiswahili and although the vast majority of the people staying at the golf resort are Kenyan, you’d be hard pressed to hear more than the occasional word in this language.

The people around me are all speaking English. Kiswahili here  appears to be a language made for talking to others but not amongst family and friends. Accents vary, often betraying the places abroad in which people have studied but Kenyan English has its own particular timbre. The stress in a word generally is at the end and sentences are often punctuated by a sharp “eh”. Kenyans speak a lilting form of English, which is far removed from the low gruff version their Nigerian cousins on the opposite side of the continent have developed.

This could almost be Hobe Sound Florida, where wealthy Americans go to retire and the younger generations pass their privileged vacations sailing, playing golf, sunning themselves by the pool and downing bloody marys in the evening at the private members’ clubs. The perfectly tended to lawns and hedges are peppered with brightly coloured birds and the villas have been built along the perimeter of the ridge, so as to be able to benefit from the best views.

From our balcony we can look down on a shimmering Lake Naivasha in the distance. At night the lights from the flower farms sparkle in bright rows. From here it’s impossible to tell how polluted its waters have become.

Nissan 4×4s and Land Rovers compete for dominance on the paved roads of the resort while children charge around on their shiny rented bikes.

Conversation, in the evening, when there is no game of Kenyan Poker going on, often focuses politics. At least one member of our party has taken the time to read the proposed constitution and argues that if it goes through, it might actually make a difference towards addressing some of the issues that are plaguing the country. People’s concerns seem to mirror those of many others I have spoken to, although the language used to support their arguments is significantly different.

Football makes up another large chunk of the subject matters discussed. I occasionally retire and read the biography of a recently retired Kenyan politician, one of Kibaki’s peers. The first chapter tells of what life was like working on the prominent colonialist Lord Delamere’s farm.  “Almost every African child was dressed in his or her traditional cloak. It was not a matter of fashion or status to be dressed in a skin; it was a normal, everyday habit, just as was the carrying of clubs and sticks by boys  … children were occupied by family chores and did not go to school”.[2]

Things have changed.

[2] Njenga Karume Beyond Expectations: From Charcoal to Gold English Press Ltd, Nairobi Kenya, 2009

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 It has been defined “the most important exhibition of Moore’s work for a generation” (The Guardian) and it certainly represents an important homage paid to Britain’s most popular sculptor and one of the crucial names in the art of sculpture in the post-Rodin era (Brancusi, Giacometti, Smith, Moore, Calder, Chillida). But alongside the bronze, granite and wooden surfaces and the flowing melody of their shapes, their critical analysis and their contextualisation, it is interesting to discover a less known side of Henry Moore: the drawer.

The drawings represent much more that just sketches in preparation for the more physical action of sculpting, providing a rather different medium of expression. Despite the bi-dimensional approach which may appear in contradiction with the idea of sculpting itself, they are means to explore forms in isolation rather than in space. Or study forms and their relation to space. In this regard, some of Moore’s drawings enact the arrangement of the finished sculpture, with stylised cows grazing on the edge of the field for which the work has been conceived. This is particularly important for the sculpture that is meant to interact with its surroundings – Chillida’s El peine del viento eroded by the sea, Anish Kapoor’s installations in urban spaces, a reclining human figure in the Yorkshire countryside. A 1942 drawing portrays a curious indistinct crowd staring at a wrapped object in an open field (the object dominating the crowd), studying not only the interaction of the work of art with its surroundings but also the interaction of the work of art with its public.

While some drawings are clearly linked with a specific subject (maternity) others are linked with the preoccupations that the artist felt at the time and not to a specific single work, thus representing an independent production. The series of drawings portraying miners and the shelters of the World War II period, both included in the Tate retrospective, are of great interest. They reveal elements inspired by The potato eaters by Vincent Van Gogh – the claustrophobia, the attention toward the oppressed working class, the dark atmosphere – and by the dreamy Caprichos by Goya – the nocturnal vision and the agitation of the nightmare –.

The exhibition explores defining subjects of Moore’s art, including the reclining figure, the iconic mother and child composition, abstraction and the seminal drawings of London during the Blitz. The mother and child theme is also studied by means of drawings. And while the pencil and the crayon defined female figures, Moore had not only in mind the traditional model – the Madonne of the Italian Quattrocento – but newer forms: a phase in Picasso’s oeuvre (Deux femmes courant sur la plage, 1922) and bodies with a wooden quality defined by Kirchner (Bathers throwing reeds, 1909). The drawings, together with the wood carvings and the sculptures, testify that by the end of the 1920s Moore had absorbed tribal art, but it was something filtrated through the Cubist experience and influenced by the novel psychoanalytic theories and ideas of sexuality.

Tate Britain, until 8 August 2010
Images: Tate © Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

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