Art, charity at Wild Geese

Stephen Garan’anga Visual Art
The fourth edition of the Wild Geese Art Festival, like its predecessor, continued to expand, chewing up every square inch of its allotted greens of Royal Mususa within the Wild Geese grounds in the outskirts of Harare.

The single day open market platform for visual art attracted practitioners from various corners of Zimbabwe, filling up the space and making it creative to navigate.

This history was in the making as some far afield artists from cities like Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Mutare and Nyanga, to highlight a few, were already stationed at the site by 5.30am when it was still nippy and misty with vision still a guessing game. By mid-morning multitudes of art lovers and buyers had started flocking in, making the space quite a sight, but more artists kept on coming with their pieces of creativity.

The parking space had consumed much of the road-width to the exhibiting space and so extended hundreds of meters into gravel pathways of the fertile agricultural lands with herds of enormous domesticated beasts watching and wondering.

The participants were artists of all ages and colour at various profession levels, from the beginners trying their luck at the market to white grannies you never thought existed on the local art scene.

Even the esteemed gallery and international exhibiting artists have jinked to the open air. This is how popular the festival has become, it is what the current arid and smothering economic climate has dictated and it is survival instinct to crowd where there are strings of hope.

The quality of the work varied from extremely exceptional to very ordinary, in all shapes sizes, though the smaller versions had a slight dominance.

The business transactions were quite good, with artists dealing directly with their clients and trustfully submitting 10 percent of their sales to the organisers for charity.

The artists’ direct contact with buyers and art lovers on the open market give them an insight on how people outside their inner circles react to their work and hand them an honest assessment of how they are doing. This is very critical especially to those who have not participated in gallery exhibitions or who have been baffled by gallery systems to meditate on the directions to take.

While the crowd which attend this local art festival is to an extent different from that which takes part in gallery shows, the reaction to visual reception of artworks by any interested parties is similar.

A staggering figure of over 2 500 people visited the June 7 art festival with more than 350 art sales that saw two charitable organisations namely Friends of Hwange Trust – who supply and maintain boreholes in Hwange National Park – and Hugugwe Children’s Home in Karoi financially benefiting from the artists’ percentage submissions as well as donations collected at the entrance point.

Like all the other previous editions of the festival, there were five prizes presented to artists courtesy of the Germany Embassy in Zimbabwe’s sponsorship that saw its Ambassador Ulrich Klockner handing over “The Best New Artist” to Franklyn Dzingai, “Best on Show” to Lisa Masterson and “Best Sculptor” to Manual Mutizwa.

“Most Unusual Work” prize went to Tafadzwa Marekera and “Best Painting” on an art competition themed “Shadows” to Boarding Dzinotizei. The prizes comprised of four gift vouchers of Winsor and Newton art products, a bucket full of sculpting materials and five one year subscriptions to Zim Artist Magazine.

The ever popular mid-afternoon quick painting demonstrations under a theme was one of the major highlights of the day with a huge crowd gathering around a voluntary small group of participants on isles, painting on a theme of choice which was either “Musk” or “Hat”.

They had 15 minutes on the clock on their 45 centimetres by 45 centimetres squared canvases whilst background music played. The event was fun and some of the emerging works were sold before they were even finished. The materials for this ‘Art Happening’ were supplied by Richard Conlon and The Framing Centre.

The annual Wild Geese Art Festival is the only one of its kind in the country dedicated to visual arts with resounding sales and numerous commissions realised for various practitioners. A year in waiting for its centre stage feels like a decade for artists in this air of nothingness.