Local artists get innovative

visual artists’ way of life that they have to learn new skills of survival to sustain their careers of choice.
Numerous artists have been caught in transit, locating and relocating, crossing boarders and high seas seeking the elusive business transactions to survive and their work too has evolved.
With the acquisition of art, traditional materials (like stone, oil paints, copper or zinc plates for printing) a lost cause, an impossible dream, they turn to what they find around them.
Shards of pots, ancient relics, today known as cultural artifacts, assume in sculpture – their rightful place as Africa’s cultural heritage.
Bits of kitchenware what is left behind of features of homes tied to tops of buses carrying families to the remotest parts of their rural areas to become part of sculptures.
Piles of rubble, once a loved and tended garden is used in sculpture. Dumps (plentiful now in cities) – tokens of new movements of people are hunting grounds for artists.
Established painter David Chinyama had a solo exhibition about the “Seven Days Theory” which was curated by his pal and colleague Masimba Hwati.
The “Seven Days Theory” commenced with a reception hosted by the National Gallery when David Chinyama vacated his home to reside in a National Gallery of Zimbabwe studio in Harare for seven days and seven nights.
He highly meditated on creation of his new work without even his cellphone or any other modern technological gadget of disturbance.
He managed to produce 18 high-calibre mixed media work which varied greatly from the work he often created prior to the event.
A remarkable exhibition of the work that followed was well received by a large crowd in attendance, making good contacts that translated into some handsome sales.
The curator himself Masimba Hwati, has just had a one-man exhibition of dizzy heights almost entirely of found objects in mixed media at Gallery Delta Foundation for art and the humanities.
Masimba vowed never to lay his hands on the art of painting even though he mastered it.
“Facsimiles of Energy” was the theme of the exhibition that laid crystal clear Masimba’s fascination with found objects and the amount of energy they possess.
His unlimited skills enable him to create all sorts with master precision from tailoring, being a cobbler, a blacksmith, a ceramist to mention a few and has grown him to be a formidable force in the country’s fine art circles.
Today there are artists who pack up their tools, their wives and kids, rope the roof of their car to start a new existence, one where art is simply “what you do” rather than what you do for a living.
They bring to these remote places what is happening in art in one place to another, and conversely they learn about new forms of art when artists are close to and dependent on nature and close to their traditions.
l Stephen Garan’anga is an international fine art practitioner, independent art projects co-ordinator, chairperson of AfricanColours Artists, executive member Batapata International Artists’ Workshop, critical visual arts writer amongst other things. He can be contacted at [email protected]