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This painting reads like a body-as-world where everything transforms into everything else - the same thick outline runs continuously from the yellow dancing figure into a bird's neck, into a chain of shells, into a house, as if all forms share one substance, the way they do in dreams or oral cosmologies.
The scales at dead center feel like the fulcrum of the piece, marking a turn from the candy-bright, playful imagery around it (fish, snails, a flower-roofed cottage, a mermaid) toward a darker, more architectural register on the lower right - a black cavity opening onto a golden domed palace, a figure held inside a ribcage-like interior, a bloodstained staircase, a bare cactus, as though the painting traces an arc from innocence toward power, confinement, or mortality.
The big pink bird-head on the right, its open mouth revealing the palace scene inside, reinforces that sense of one continuous body containing multitudes.
Born in 1974 in Mumias, western Kenya, Erick Sande trained as a graphic designer at The Kenya Polytechnic before turning to painting, exhibiting early work at the Kenya National Museum Gallery. A 1995 meeting with Ruth Schaffner, founder of Gallery Watatu, launched his career in Nairobi’s art community. His early work drew on Abaluyia tradition and myth; it has since broadened toward multiculturalism, patriotism, and the athleticism of Kenyans as a unifying national force. Working across media in a style of continual fusion & experimentation, Sande has exhibited solo and in groups at multiple venues. His illustrations appear in the poetry collection Makonde by Joan Sikand. He lives & works in Nairobi.
