{"id":700,"count":13,"description":"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.\r\n\r\nIn the middle  of 1998, he managed  to move to ZIMBABWE, where he attended high school. \r\n\r\nIn 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.\r\nSince 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.\r\n\r\nHe 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. \r\n\r\nIn 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.\r\n\r\nThis led to a newspaper article in which he mentioned Mr Andrew Cooper as the artist he admired.\r\nMr Cooper read this and searched out the fledgling artist, shocking Eric, who  idolized him. Cooper agreed to become his mentor.\r\n\r\nMr 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. \r\n\r\nMr 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. \r\n\r\nEric 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.\r\n\r\nNow he is painting full time.\r\n\r\nEric 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.","link":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/?product_cat=eric-karangwa","name":"Eric Karangwa","slug":"eric-karangwa","taxonomy":"product_cat","parent":43,"meta":[],"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/product_cat\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/product_cat"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/product_cat"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/product_cat\/43"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kunyeartfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fproduct&product_cat=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}