Rainbow Art students express themselves through art
Spira Tlhankane | Friday June 5, 2015 18:00
For Rainbow art students, the craft offers some space to pour out their concerns and share their emotive turbulences. The young souls have watched with a lot of concern as predicament of global warming continues to threaten the very existence of mankind. They have been both spontaneous and brave enough to express their concerns through art.
The students this week expressed their climate change concerns by way of paintings on the big flower beds in front of the British High Commission building in Main Mall Gaborone. The project is part of the British High Commission’s initiative to create climatic change awareness through art.
The students’s paintings are not only beautiful, but are also very educative.
Through their paintings, they have shared harsh reality of global warming and hope to influence all who would lay their eyes on the pieces to grasp the message and share it with the world. Although done in a creative way the students have clearly painted what would happen in future unless something is done to halt the destructive activities. One of the paintings depicts a pair of hands holding a burning globe.
The painting put Africa in the centre to show that Africa has been identified as one of the major “victims” of climate change. The painter Cheney Masson told Arts&Culture that she wanted to remind her audience that the future of the world is in everyone’s hands.
“I wanted to indicate that this is a global issue and being a student in Africa, I wanted to show that indeed climate change affects us the most and we can all help raise awareness,” she said. Another student, Prince Magapatona said he has used art as a springboard for exploring the issues of concerns to him. He said that in one of his paintings, he wanted to show that people care only about how they look on the outside but did not care about the environment.
“I intend to deliver a message through my art. Expressing myself through painting gives me pleasure because I know that it would reach out to the rest of Batswana,” he said.
One of the paintings vividly depicts Botswana sinking deep into the ground as a result of irregular stormy rainfalls.
The painting uses the map of Botswana along with the nation’s flag colours to indicate the identity. Far above ground, there are strong winds destroying everything on their way. With the students’s big paintings now in the public domain, they offer the young artists a good platform to showcase their talent while at the same time affording shoppers a relaxed atmosphere to admire the paintings in an open space.
Painted on a blue background, all the paintings have bright and strong colours to attract audience and tell the story. It took the students two weeks to complete the paintings.