Art is more than just putting a brush onto a canvas. It is a way of creating, expressing, exploring your imagination and communicating vital messages. Art can also be a way of teaching and empowering, but most importantly, it can be a message. Art can have remarkable effects on the audience and also on the artist. For Gift Kademaunga, art has become reality and is a full time profession.

By Kudakwashe E. Zihonye

Gift Kademaunga is a 22 year old self-taught artist who is based in Kariba. He does a lot of artwork from  pencil drawing, water colour, charcoal, Conte Crayon, Pastel and Acrylic. Gift’s artworks include  art models, sculpture, portrait paintings, abstract painting, graffiti, wall painting, wildlife art, rock painting, quick sketches and whole lot more. He has been in love  with art since the age of four. The talent grew from drawing cartoons and scribbling graffiti on walls and this love of art has taken him into the real artistic world now.

Gift said that art was more than a profession to him. It, he said, is a visual talent which is meant to give people a deeper meaning of life.

“I see Art as a skill that involves deep complexities and creativity of the  mind in the expression of imagination. Art can be visual, auditory or written. To me art is an inborn talent that I seem to possess, and it  is effortless,” he said.

The self-taught artist said that he loved his work and was committed to work harder and deliver more wall paintings, portraits, special paintings, cartoon paintings, graffiti and all the other types of painting.

” I love my work, and I  practise. As  an artist, I spend  most of my time in the studio. Through that, I am able to create and see the world differently from everybody else. This is because I will  be staying in my own imaginary world. I still have a lot to do to put my career on a sound footing and polish my skills.”

For Anesu,  another young artist in Harare, being an artist is more than just drawing. It’s the ability to express oneself through drawings, to show people’s suffering, their calamities and feelings. This has been done through a number of paintings that he has drawn which show the hidden messages or concepts.

“Art is a way of expressing one’s perspective of the world through images. When people decode the meanings, it means that they can relate to artistic pieces or they know about the the situations being protrayed. Most people can draw but do not have the ability to show a deeper meaning  such as when I drew a piece which showed depressed youths in Zimbabwe. I drew that piece because I realised that youths did not know what their future holds,” he said.

Gift’s dream is to become a renowned professional artist so that he can showcase his works at international exhibitions.