If you visit the One Off Contemporary Art Gallery in Nairobi, despite the nipping cold in the city, it exudes a warm hue. It is a walk back in time when art spoke out with a simplicity that rang loud, when the masters of the craft left it all on canvases and etched their names on the halls of fame.
The Light That We Are as the current exhibition is simply art in its majesty.
The murals on the walls are the handiwork of Olivia Pendergast. An alumnus of Columbus, she epitomises the magic that happens when art and inspiration read from the same script.
She started painting when she was four years old and always knew that she wanted to do art (her grandfather and uncle were both artists).
After college, she worked as a special effects artist in the Los Angeles Film Industry doing conceptual designs and sculptures in the studios but at 29, her heart called her back to painting which she has been doing ever since.
She recalls selling her first paintings in elementary school for $5 (Sh650) but as it stands now, her paintings in the gallery range from between $750 (Sh97,000) to $5,900 (Sh763,000).
Most muses in the portraits are Kenyans, which is deliberate because she is a stickler of sorts for painting that which surrounds her in terms of race background and disposition.
In understanding the nature of her work, one gets the impression that Olivia isn’t one to be cuffed in familiarity, it feels small to her, the underrepresentation of people of colour in artwork despite their glaring beauty is partly also what fuels her to paint her subjects in a context that is different from her background.
“I don’t just paint Kenyans, I paint whatever I am around that is beautiful, whether it is a landscape or a Chinese or an Italian person in America. I happen to be in Kenya now and the Kenyan people are so beautiful, so it works out well for me,” she says.
Even Her Oil on canvas painting by Olivia Pendergast pictured at the One-off Art Gallery in Nairobi on March 30, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
Her paintings are hanging symbols of diversity because she is rooted in the freedom of art, which is shown by her subjects who rock all forms of colour. But it gets better. She believes that on a good painting, one can almost count all the brushstrokes, the fewer the strokes, the more successful a painting.
“Good paintings have an effortlessness to them. When I overwork on a painting, I usually feel it's not good enough and then I have to wipe it off.”
The best part about the exhibition would be Olivia’s understanding of colours. She does it with such unfettered simplicity, and in looking at her paintings one feels grounded by the ease of palate, the effrontery, the earthy nature of and the use of light and balance to imbue perfection. Her work may look and seem simple, but the technique applied comes nowhere near the paltriness of simplicity.
In some circles, she has been labelled as a colourist, and she acknowledges that in her compositions she doesn’t use her colours straight from the tube.
“I have a form of synesthesia, which is where you feel colours. It is a cross-wiring in the brain. You get mathematicians who can hear and feel numbers and don’t need to write down calculations and equations, and so for me, I can feel colours in my body and I just know that colours come for me in a way that they don’t for most people. Every time I mix a colour, whatever composition I come up with is always bang on with my intentions. I get different sensations with different colours.”
Her paintings evoke memories of a grand era of painters now long gone. An almost classical era when paintings would just draw you in regardless of whether you understood art or not. This is also because she is inspired by classical art and its lucidity.
“Sometimes art becomes complicated as we try to make it conceptual and edgy and from the mind. The paintings that I am doing come from the heart,” she says “I don’t need art to be complicated, I am interested in beauty, and I feel like beauty is almost looked down upon in the world, like in architecture where you have square buildings all over with no beauty to them. My daughter who is an architect opened my eyes to this, there is just boxes all over, all expensive but with no beauty to them.”
Aware of Hibiscus Oil on canvas painting by Olivia Pendergast pictured at the One-off Art Gallery in Nairobi on March 30, 2025.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
Classism is seen in the poses and the halos in her paintings. There is a further stillness in her work that is deliberate because of her background in meditation, it is the nascent nature of artists to transfuse their hobbies into their crafts.
The Light that We Are speaks of Olivia’s exasperation at people’s obsession with their own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions so that they don’t slow down to understand that we are all filled with this light that shines through us and we all are the same thing.
It is worth noting that in her larger murals, none of her subjects takes centre stage, she plays with space and positioning almost deliberately and whereas most artists are in a hurry to fill up spaces with more subjects, Olivia is comfortable allowing space to take centre stage.
“A negative space or an empty space is one of my favourite things to play with. It has a push and pull [effect] with the subjects and even has more paint than the subjects in the portraits. The transparency of the subjects depicts that they are not all they think they are. As for emptiness, I like emptiness in things, there is not enough space in our lives, we are constantly terrified of emptiness and are looking to fill it with noise and clutter and people and social media,” she notes.
“You go to forests and see people carrying Bluetooth speakers and in museums, you will find people on their phones snapping away, oblivious to their surroundings, we cannot handle quiet and that makes me sad because that is where the richness of life is.”
“The richness of life is the quiet pauses where we almost lose our breaths because we are overwhelmed by the beauty of the things we witness. That is where happiness is at, the end of seeking”
