Artist who draws inspiration from her home garden
Mary Collis by her orchids in her garden. Photo/MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
By MARGARETTA WA GACHERU
Posted Thursday, April 17 2014 at 17:14
Posted Thursday, April 17 2014 at 17:14
Alan and Mary Collis moved into their home in
Loresho in 1976. The home, which sits on a 2.5 acre plot, came with an
unkempt, overgrown garden which ended at Mathare River.
Soon Alan took up the role of restoring the
garden, it all started with two thorn trees, a flame tree, several palms
and a monkey puzzle tree.
Today the beautiful garden is a source of
inspiration for Mary, one of Kenya’s leading abstract expressionist
artists and the co-founder of Rahimtullah Museum of Modern Art (RaMoMa).
She founded it with Carol Lees and currently being revived on Mfangano Street in the Rahimtullah Library.
Mary admits she is not, and never was, a gardener
but it’s in her garden that she draws inspiration. As a colourist, she
favours gardens that are rich in a wide variety of riotous hues giving
the example of the late Erica Boswells garden, founder of the former Jax
fashion house.
“We left Just about half of our land (2.5 acres)
to remain as it was, wild and overgrown, which has a natural beauty of
its own, especially as all of those trees are indigenous to this area of
Nairobi,” says Mary, who has been painting her own as well as other
people’s gardens for many years.
She loves the variegated shades of green that she
finds in her own garden. Her garden boasts a variety of shrubs,
succulents and the majestic Monkey Puzzle tree, known as the Araucaria
araucana or the Chilean Pine, which seems to crown her front lawn with a
dazzling display of abundant verdant vines that hug and spread out
widely around the base of a tree.
The trunk of the 38 year old tree rises strong,
thick and erect with the leafy green branches that veritably explode at
the top of the puzzle tree extend in the sky almost as widely as the
vines on the ground.
For Mary, the only tree in her garden that can
match the Monkey Puzzle for majesty and strength is the Mugumo tree (Fig
tree). “It’s been here long before we arrived so we have no intention
of ever chopping it down,” said the second generation Kenyan.
One of her favourite shrubs in her back yard is an
Indian Almond, a large tropical tree known as Terminalia catappa, which
she says the birds adore. They are always hanging around it, especially
as it’s not far from the bird feeder, she says.
One of her greatest delights is waking up and
having breakfast at her veranda which looks directly out on the Indian
Almond and seeing bird watching.
She draws a lot of inspiration from her rose garden, which was not in full bloom when we arrived recently.
She anticipates painting it again when the roses are flush with bright beautiful hues of pink, yellow, white and bright red.
It’s hard to tell that the colour scheme in her
abstract expressionist art comes directly from her garden. Often the
work looks like splashes of colour, not discrete pink or purple petals
bound together at the stem.
One of her favourite flowers in the garden, apart
from the roses, is the Orchid. Her orchids are in portable pots so she
can take them out into the open air when it rains but also to have them
close at hand for inspiration.
“All the orchids I have are indigenous to Kenya, and they are beautiful,” she says.
Mary is a self-taught artist who began her career
as a graphic designer but gradually realised her first love was actually
painting not graphics.
Mary and Alan live on the far west end of the
Mathare River Valley and the lush floral greenery of their garden gives
one an inkling of what the same Mathare Valley must have looked like
many years ago when it was still well-watered bush.
Today it’s more of a slum devoid of the vegetation.
One can only hope that one day the entire city of
Nairobi will again be the green ‘city in the sun’, just as lush and
cared for and conserved as the space occupied by the Collis’s.
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