Artist creates ‘girls’ using digital tools

Anne Gichuku (aka bissu_art on Instagram) is one of our next generation Kenyan artists who can fairly describe herself as being truly “self-taught”. Or, perhaps more accurately, you could call her “YouTube-taught”, since she has learnt all she knows about digital art (which is her medium of expression) through YouTube tutorials.

Her exhibition of digital art, currently on at Alliance Française, is evidence that Anne is proficient in her chosen field of expression. “A Girl Like Me”, the title of her first solo show, is dedicated to young “girls” like herself.

The exhibition of 30 digital works on canvas is filled with images of girls who are black, fun, free-spirited and unpredictable. There’s only one guy in her show, and he is drawn inside a fruity ice popsicle that a girl three times his size is getting set to lick the life out of!

Otherwise, her girls come in all sizes, shapes and activities. Some are beautiful, others have TV sets for heads, while others are “aliens” from outer space. Her alien girls tend to have a third eye and hair that is either turquoise blue, pink, purple or green or white. The important thing, she says, is they’re all black.

“I love drawing girls and girls who are black since we’re always marginalised and this is my chance to turn the tide,” says Anne, who is quite fearless about her feminist cause.

DIGITAL ARTIST

What I find fascinating is the fact that no digital artist on the local scene inspired her to develop her artistic skills in ICT. She did discover some women digital artists online and sought to buy their art. “But as they’d have come from overseas, the shipping would have been expensive,” she says. So rather than forget this newfound interest, she decided to create digital art of her own.

That’s how she discovered programs like Photoshop and Painttool SAI, IT programs that had lots of potential for use in creating digital art.

But Anne, 24, is actually an artist who’s just modest about her skills as an “analogue artist”, meaning an artist who can draw lovely imagery on paper and pen. It is those skills that she uses to draw and then develop digitally, first by scanning her image. Then she completes the artwork with Photoshop and Painttool.

Placing most of her art on her Instagram account, Anne says she also likes digital art for economy’s sake. Going to shops and buying art materials can be extremely expensive, she says. But once she’s bought those essential programs, she feels there’s no end to her artistic output.

Anne even posts short videos on the web that illustrate the way her computer, armed with yet another IT program, can retrace the artistic steps she took that led to her development of a specific piece.

“After I complete a work, I transform it into a PDF and then take it to a printer near River Road that takes my artworks and prints them on canvas,” says Anne, who found this particular printer just walking around Nairobi’s back streets till she found one who was reasonably priced.

Anne admits there is nothing really profound about her digital art. “I originally made it for myself. But then I realised that somebody else might like it too. That’s when I decided to sell some of it and also have an exhibition in town”.

Anne just started doing digital art in 2017, but she has already won one of the Sondeka 2018 awards in the “Digital Art” category. The year 2017 is also when she graduated from Daystar University with a major not in art but in music.