Eric Karangwa

Eric KARANGWA was born in Rwanda 1984. He fled the country 1994 to Tanzania, where he lived in a refugee camp with other refugees until 1996.

In the middle of 1998, he managed to move to ZIMBABWE, where he attended high school.

In 2004, he moved to South Africa. As a car-guard at the Constantia Village shopping center, he often walked past the centers art gallery on his break, admiring the work on the display. One artist paintings particularly cought his eyes. Tokai landscape artist Andrew Cooper.
Since then, he had a dream to meet Andrew Cooper and wanted to paint like him. In 2005 he started painting with craft paint, moving on to acrylic the following year, and then oil in 2009.

He spent two years studying the work of professional artists in acrylics. He would visit all galleries all over Cape Town wanting to know how other artists paint, comparing his work to theirs and even taking some of his paintings to them for a critique.

In 2013, he took one of his paintings ( a portrait of MADIBA) into Constantia Village management. The management was so impressed with his work, they offered him to host his first exhibition. He had three paintings sold within three days.

This led to a newspaper article in which he mentioned Mr Andrew Cooper as the artist he admired.
Mr Cooper read this and searched out the fledgling artist, shocking Eric, who idolized him. Cooper agreed to become his mentor.

Mr Cooper taught him about light and how it changes at different times of the day, how to blend colours to achieve the ideal atmosphere and the importance of composition.

Mr Cooper also advised Eric about the more serious side of being an artist, like how to market himself, what price to sell his paintings for, the importance of interpersonal communication, and most importantly budgeting.

Eric may still have a long artistic journey ahead of him, but what makes him stand out from the crowd is his dedication to his passion. He was only occasionally guards cars and painting from 20:00 until 01:00.

Now he is painting full time.

Eric uses his bicycle, cycling around exploring the Cape’s surrounding mountains, rivers, and beaches to expand on his subject matter. He paints full-time day and night as well, but now he relies on the sale of his paintings to eat, pay the rent, and buy new materials to produce more art.