Mike Ghaui

Mike Ghaui grew up on a farm in Tanzania’s southern highlands, spending his childhood camped with his family in the country’s game parks. He studied art in Kenya and agriculture at Wye College in England, then turned to painting full time in 1978 — and the bush has stayed his studio ever since. He has spent months of every year camped in the Tanzanian wild, filling the field sketches that become these oils. Look for the dust and heat in his light, the half-abstract foregrounds, and the dry leonotis stem he works into every painting.

Since 1995 he has sculpted as well, casting his bronzes and sterling silver at the Pangolin foundry in Gloucestershire, England. He has exhibited in Nairobi and across the United States since 1975, including the Woodson Art Museum’s Wildlife in Art; his work has been carried by galleries in Santa Fe, London and South Africa, appears at auction, and hangs in private collections around the world. Collectors seek him out for what few wildlife artists can claim — a lifetime in the field with the animals he paints. Here, in the country of his birth, eighty of his paintings and bronzes hang together on our first floor, each one of one.