Some words from Pierre Berton
Canadian author and historian
It was Canada’s great good fortune, when in late 1966, on the very eve of our centennial, Nym Gautama should have decided to enjoy a short vacation in Montreal. She was 37 at the time, at native of Kenya, a graduate of the University of London, an accomplished painter, batik artist and art teacher, already achieving an international reputation.
How fortunate for us that her short vacation changed her life and turned her into a Canadian! Urged to stay, she took out citizenship and has since enjoyed an impressive career.
Though she lives and teaches in Ottawa where she has raised her four children, she has exhibited her work all over the world and calls herself, correctly, a Canadian artist, teacher, musician and activist, she works in a dazzling variety of media – gouaches, oils, watercolours and, of course, batiks, which she has transformed from native craft into a high art.
She has exhibited in Kenya, her parents’ adopted home, in New Delhi, Barcelona, Miami, Carmel, Washington, London, and West Berlin. She was less than a year in this country when she launched her first exhibit in Toronto’s Yorkville district, which I had the privilege of opening. Since that time her international reputation has grown, even as her own work has matured and changed. Her influences are varied and exotic, they range from the mountains of her native Kenya, to the plumed Himalayas of her ancestral nation. She has travelled widely in India, Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, and shows the influence of artists in all those continents.
No wonder, then, that her own art never stands still. Her themes, her styles, her subjects are ever changing. As she has said, I cannot be content with the stagnation of painting the same subject, the same themes over and over again… As a result, her art has become more introspective, more serious, more metaphysical, and more abstract as she experiments with every medium from oils to batik work. We are grateful for her presence, she is an ornament to her adopted country and a flowing reminder of the riches of the Canadian mosaic.
