Making art from visions of Africa
By BRUCE INGRAM Contributor February 7, 2012 7:46PM
Amani and Cynthia Simone Borah
‘Maji Mazito’
Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake St., Oak Park
Exhibit runs through February
Free
(708) 383-8200 or visit oppl.org
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Updated: February 10, 2012 10:39AM
All his life, Amani Borah has been making art for pleasure, drawing pictures for the fun of it and giving them away, usually, or even throwing them away.
So it came as a bit of a surprise to him when he had his first exhibit of sketches two years ago in Oak Park’s Third Friday Gallery — and people bought them.
“Wow; I couldn’t believe it,” said Borah, a native of Kenya. He came to America in 2003 as a performer in an acrobatic troupe that he still performs with and settled in Georgia before moving to Oak Park in 2009. “All my life I’ve made drawings, but just because I love doing it. I was so surprised when someone bought them. I thought, ‘This is really cool!’ ”
It was so cool, in fact, that with the encouragement of his wife, Cynthia Simone Borah, who also arranged Borah’s first show of sketches, he began working on his first paintings. They will be displayed in an exhibit entitled “Maji Mazito” — “Strong Water” in Swahili — during February in the art gallery of the Oak Park Library.
Inspired by memories of his home country and images from his dreams, Borah uses pencil, ink, markers, paint pens and glitter to create vivid, colorful, two-dimensional representations of the villages, animals, trees and flowers of Kenya. He also likes doing abstract, mandala-like variations on the same themes.
“When I saw his sketches, I thought they were really beautiful,” said Cynthia Borah, an eighth-grade teacher at Oak Park’s Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School as well as an African djembe drummer. She met her husband in 2009 while performing for the Kenyan Safari Acrobats troupe he appeared in during an African arts festival on the South Side of Chicago. “And his paintings are even more striking. They’re so textured and detailed that people sometimes think they’re on material like cloth or wood.”
Borah said that, for him, making art has always been “a love thing. It’s always been my favorite thing to do,” he said. “I just love to draw; it makes me happy.”
Apparently, that feeling is contagious.
“People who buy them are always saying his paintings make them feel happy,” his wife said. “And he loves to hear that.”
“Yes, I’m very happy when I hear that my art makes people happy,” Borah said with a laugh. “It makes me want to keep painting more and more.”
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