Nayna.

The most important person in Nayna's life was her grandmother Wanjiku, who sold chai — spiced tea — at a station in Nairobi. She died on a Tuesday in August, making the morning batch, and Nayna arrived twenty minutes late. The first thing she did was take the red scarf with black polka dots off her grandmother's neck and tie it around her own; she hasn't taken it off in three years. In the portrait she's wearing it: it's the only thing this print tells you about all of that. The rest is in her biography.

With Animal Kinhood I've spent years portraying animals in clothes, living the lives of working people: here, a cheetah who runs her own motorcycle workshop alone in Nairobi's industrial district and fixes, in intense bursts, what everyone else has given up for dead. Nayna is one of those characters, and this print takes her out of her story and puts her in your home. I created her facing forward, against a clean background: on a wall, she doesn't need anything around her. As a fine art print signed by me, Yago Partal, the matte finish avoids glare and looks good over a desk or in a hallway. If you like her, there are more characters in the rest of the collection.