“The spontaneity and undefined barriers that the abstract painting process gives back is a wonderful feeling. Creating an abstract painting is a search for harmony where one is allowed to express themselves without judgement. Where the painting journey goes is usually a mystery.

The Artist

A fine art graduate of the Buruburu Institute of Fine Art College Nairobi, Emily’s paintings operate in the tensions between stillness and movement, solidity and transience, colours, light and textures.

From childhood Emily painted and drew.  She states: ‘my paintings are my distilled response to emotional experience. I paint instinctively, but aim to make paintings which resolve an unfiltered visceral impact with a certain degree of cohesive refinement.’ Emily’s inspiration comes from everyday experiences, from emotions, people, to nature. She also experiments with graphical elements in her paintings, fusing color and line work to create a composition.

She works on individual as well as multiple canvases and use color as the basis for artistic expression, as well as a lot of line work to define her compositions. In most cases she reduces real objects to basic patterns such as triangles, square and rectangle using line and color to reveal characters of object and people, the same way other artists do give true feel of what they are depicting, the difference in hers is in the amount of detail which is definately less.

To Emily, Art is beyond the canvas, pigments and techniques, which have been her tools to express what she loves doing best. “art is an external expression of the artist’s inner life.”