Natocho Paints Her Mind

Dec 11, 2003

IT is all about feelings,” says Annette Natocho when asked about her major source of inspiration in her paintings.

By Stephen Ssenkaaba
IT is all about feelings,” says Annette Natocho when asked about her major source of inspiration in her paintings.
So when she wants to paint, Natocho will retreat to a deep forest, take a closer look at the lush greenery and study the surroundings. Yet she is not your pleinair artist (one who paints on scene).
After critically observing and studying her subject, she comes back to the studio and starts painting.
Natocho’s work, now on display at Afriart gallery at Lugogo’s UMA showgrounds is a collection of carefully chosen sceneries of beautiful landscapes and flora from different parts of the country.
“Nature is beautiful and it is through nature that I express my feelings about the world around me,” says the light-skinned slender painter.
“I do not paint what my eyes see, but what my mind perceives because I believe that creativity is harnessing universality and seeing life flow in your own eyes,” she adds.
Why she has entitled her two-week exhibition ‘A spiritual walk with watercolour,’ is not very apparent because her work hardly connotes spiritual themes. While some of Natocho’s works depict her own experiences at different landscapes, others are a combination of the artist’s imagination and what she has heard others say about the different sceneries in and outside Uganda.
Using a combination of watercolour and ink on paper surface, Natocho gives a human face to what would otherwise look like the wilderness.
Her choice of colour is somewhat restricted to the bright and eye-friendly yellows, whites, oranges and a few plashes of pink.
Carefully but tactfully, she contrasts her paintings with a mixture of dark shades like green, purple and tiny bits of red and brown.
Even though she tends to over dwell on the use of bright hues, her wise albeit conscious mixture of dark and light hues give her works a warm composition. She uses space in many of her paintings to draw the viewers’ attention to particular images in her art.
While this might attract viewers to specific spots, it might also distract more focused viewers, simply because the space in many of her work render her paintings rather hollow.
Using both her fertile imagination and creativity, Natocho gives a touch of life, to different landscapes in Uganda.
Her depiction of Lake Bunyonyi at sunset with a huge black silhouette of dusk evokes memories of the fading sun in a remote countryside resort, while her paintings of the sun smiling down upon the sandy beaches in Zanzibar is characteristic of the gorgeous lakeside scenery.
Her work is a blend of artistry abstraction and surrealism and a lot of it tied to the same scenes and subjects.
While this depicts consistence in her work, it gets a little monotonous.
Born and raised in the city, one is tempted to think that Natocho would have made a better artist if she drew her subjects from real life experiences.
Ends

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