Makush Art Gallery

Last evening I went to a restaurant in downtown Addis Ababa called
Makush Art Gallery. As you can tell from the name, the restaurant
doubled as a place for artists to display and sell their work so the
walls were covered with various paintings of scenes from both the urban
and rural landscape, as well as abstract paintings, traditional art and
some human portraits. The menu was mostly Italian with some steak
selections as well. To make up for the horrible lunch we had yesterday,
I again ordered tortellini, this time with fresh cream sauce and ham (I
couldn't allow that to be my coworkers only impression of one of my
favorite pasta dishes), along with a cheese, mushroom and ham calzone
and a green salad with oil and vinegar dressing and tomato slices,
chopped onions and black olives. As is customary in Japan, we got extra
plates to share the meal, which I washed down with a glass of red wine
from S. Africa and my coworker ordered a St. George beer brewed here in
Addis. The other diners were mostly European but it seemed like a
popular getaway for locals as well. The paintings were modestly priced
between $100~$300 on average with some slightly lower priced ones just
outside the gallery in the entrance hall. One I liked in particular was
an urban scene stripped of complexity, simply featuring the blue minibus
taxis parked in a cluster on a mustard yellow canvas, and in the
foreground were two healthy but solemn-faced donkeys in black and gray
carrying a load on their backs. I thought that one was able to
skillfully utilize both subdued and bright colors to highlight the
conventional and technological methods used to transport people and
things around this congested urban landscape.