Life After Farming

Source: Zimbabwe Independent (Harare)

Date: 22 December 2006

Author: Dusty Miller

A STUNNING new highly-gifted local wildlife and landscape painter burst upon the Harare art scene last Thursday with a one-man exhibition of oil-on-canvas studies at Richard Rennie Galleries, Belgravia.

Barry Thomas (32) took up painting seriously after being thrown off Tsandzwa, the Doma tobacco, maize, cotton and cattle farm his family had owned for two generations.
He studied under international best-selling wildlife artist Craig Bone at the studio Bone opened in Chinhoyi, after losing his Makonde farm to the land resettlement programme.

Among many pictures exhibited was a brooding study of a herd of buffalo on the banks of the Zambezi River. A dramatic effect is underscored by the herd creating their own mini-dust storm, with the green of trees in the river line giving bold contrast. The dominant alpha-bull, still with flakes of dried mud from a previous riverine wallow, stares at the artist from an eroded river bank and a snowy-white cattle egret ("tick-bird") taking flight gives the picture required movement.

Thomas says he is slowly moving away from wildlife studies, which he considers "overdone" and will concentrate on "realistic landscapes". "Realism" personifies his work and he has an enviable talent for capturing the various moods of the ever changing African sky.

If you've never seen Chipinda Pools, in Gonarezhou National Park of the Lowveld, you can certainly imagine it, almost smell it, through a painting of an almost dry Runde River trickling through sere, arid, bleak countryside, featuring stunted vegetation and almost dwarf mopani scrub. A bataleur eagle hunting in the middle sky steals the scene for me.

Most of Thomas' work was painted in Mana Pools, with some in the Lowveld and the World's View area of Nyanga is also popular. He admits to using a certain amount of artistic licence. Having found no game at the hauntingly beautiful Kasawe Springs at Mana near the Chewore River he has added a brace of elephant, a pair of zebra and a family of francolin to the semi-desert landscape. A "non-specific but typical" watering hole at Mana, with Acacia albida trees creating their trademark blue haze, shows baboon, waterbuck, impala and zebra, presumably having drunk their fill, grazing albida pods which are a rich food source for many animals. He has been painting, professionally, for three and a half years and samples of his work can be seen at Richard Rennie Galleries and Willowmead Junction Coffee Shop in Harare.