Veronika Hart is a relative newcomer to Western North Carolina. She formerly lived in the metropolitan New York City area, where she exhibited and won awards in the Connecticut suburbs of New Canaan and Greenwich, in Westchester County and in New York City proper. She has also exhibited in Washington, DC. About a dozen of her oils, including several borrowed from their current owners, were included in her first North Carolina exhibit, entitled “Africa: Portraits of Power,” at the YMI Cultural Center in Asheville in the spring of 2008.
Hart spent the first fifteen years of her life absorbing two cultures: Europe and Africa. The interior of her parents’ house in Tanganyika was furnished in a purely European fashion: European books, European art, European furniture. But the moment she went out the door, she was immersed in the sights, sounds and human interactions to be found in East Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s. At age 15 she moved to Germany to study art. There she encountered for the first time motorcars, electric lights and - even more shocking - abstract expressionism. Feeling no kinship with abstract painting, she shifted her attention in Art School to illustration in order to continue with her realistic brush strokes.
Hart’s fine art pieces are mostly large format oil paintings on canvas, many 50” x 72” or larger, in a style that is termed “imaginative realism.” Drawing upon her experience as a medical illustrator in Europe and her later work creating illustrations for recordings, books and advertisements in New York, she continues to paint in the representational style that she has followed since she was a child in Tanganyika and Tanzania. But her fine art depicts in realistic detail scenes that are purely in her imagination, scenes of African people and animals in symbiotic relationships and sometimes flowing into each other. Her themes primarily reflect issues of contemporary and recent East Africa, themes of peaceful accord, of wildlife conservation, and of the strength of African women.
Painted from a photograph of the three Hart children with two of their African minders, “Ela and Omari” is photographically real, as are some other paintings that we saw last spring. But most thought provoking are those that stray from reality. “Race (Two children with Leopards)” and “Zebra Children” both comment on the threat of modern industrialization to traditional African wildlife. In “Zebra Children,” the two zebras meld into each other, and the two children, protecting the zebras, share body parts with the animals in a natural organic manner. “The Spirit of Mama Simba’s Children” shows a human mother and a lioness merging, protecting a human child and a lion cub that similarly merge.
An outstanding triptych is titled “Finding Balance.” Each panel addresses an environmental concern, and the lush painting of the cheetah, the elephants, and the African buffalo (being ridden by a powerful female) is a thing of joy.
If you missed the YMI exhibit last year, you will want to go online to her website at www.veronikahart.com (Veronika with a "k"), study her art and make arrangements to see it in person. If you did visit the YMI exhibit last year, the website will allow you to rekindle the joy you experienced when you first saw Veronika Hart’s stunning paintings.
© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine
Arts Spectrum column #451
September 18, 2009
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ReplyDeleteI viewed Hart's work at Augusta State University and was immediately struck by the similarity between her childhood and the childhood of a fictitious character depicted in the German film, "Nirgendwo in Afrika". I do hope she is aware of the film, I think she would identify strongly with many scenes. r.v.dillenbeck7720@att.net
ReplyDeleteRichard