Sharon Patrick

For some people, painting means outdated wall hangers of faded portraits or illustrations and weary collections of vintage art on ancient subjects and themes, but 21-year-old Sharon Patrick can think of ways to make the visual medium a more intriguing form of art.


She paints humans with deformed faces, without mouths or eyes, breasts with no nipples, and her paintings as a result, are visually engaging. A recent Applied Art and Design graduate from the Harare Polytechnic College, Patrick began painting at an early age whilst still at junior school where two of her works exhibited, won a merit award and attained a prize under the theme Save The Wild Flowers. She never ceased to explore artistic talent since then, identifying, examining, capturing and communicating tales of enormous human importance through painting. Her works carry transformational, social messages that range from tradition to religion, sexuality to equality. She sees her painting as a “projection of thoughts and expressions, felt through surrealism and iconography."


A couple of years ago her paintings were exhibiting at Zimbabwe’s National Art Gallery, and owing to college pressures she directed her energies towards private collections. These featured fine nuances and delicate shading of female image in water-colours looking at their reflections as rhymes are repeated in poetry.''I paint a lot of women because I feel as a woman it is my time to explore and capture the female. I find it more interesting,'' she says.


Poet and sculptor, Manikongo, currently on a United States tour, found her work stunning and asked her to produce paintings for exhibition in the United States and Mexico where the poet is scheduled to perform this summer. While Patrick is not quite hesitant to make international exploits her sole focus, she views her painting as a passionate communication of her African experiences “in different forms and colour." Part of her series collection, Hunters and Gatherers reflects a deep provocative commitment to a wide spectrum of human development, simplified emotions, and a depiction of rural African folklore in it's rarest forms.


Patrick's paintings belong to the realism movement of what she describes as “art seeking surface meaning all things ... and a harsh awakening to self-realisation." Almost similar to the works of French artist Paul Cezanne, her paintings are independent and sometimes outrageous. In a deep sense they are often bound up with nudity.


''I am inspired by the burdens, pressures and joys that accompany life. I am mainly influenced by early renaissance century artists like Titian and Michele, as well as the conventional modern artists, adopting traits from pieces such as Chiarroscuro by Carravagio, and basing my subjects upon the biblical world as Emile Molele did in The Last Supper.


Patrick is an avid admirer of Zimbabwe's own international design guru Chaz Mavinyane. ''His work is brilliant and I wouldn't mind getting to his level," she says.


"In a way I like to be informative, and when people look at my paintings they get shocked and ask me, are you normal or what? It’s just dramatic."