Actually, in person, Veronika Hart is fairly sunny. But in her artwork, she meditates on the strife and drama of East Africa.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Anthony Bellemare

“I’m painting Africa,” says Hendersonville painter Veronika Hart. And to look at her paintings, nothing could be more clear. Though her family is German and she’s lived in Europe and New York City, her upbringing in Africa has everything to do with the work she creates today. “I’m not painting to make a statement of that sort,” she says. “I just feel I have to express my yearning for something I’ve lost.”

As a girl growing up in Tanganyika (Tanzania today), Hart, now 63, spent hours drawing zebra herds and lions in the sandy beaches of the Indian Ocean. She was the youngest of four children and the family artist. Her mother fled Nazi Germany and married her father in Africa. Hart remembers playing with children from African families for years until she went to a British boarding school. “Growing up, I had an amazing sense of freedom,” she says. “I never felt I was trespassing on someone else’s property. I could wander anywhere and feel safe.”

Her yearning to recreate scenes from childhood started late in 2003 when she returned to Africa with her mother and sister. It became a deeply emotional trip. “It seemed I had one foot still in Africa,” says Hart. “I was really torn.” She began creating works reflecting the spirit of the continent and its political complexities as she saw them.

Hart’s paintings have hung in places like the YMI Cultural Center in downtown Asheville, and last month, they were on display at the Louise Jones Brown Gallery at Duke University. This fall, she has a show coming up at the Byrd Gallery of Art at Augusta State University in Georgia.

To make the work, she starts with a precise composition—often making small sketches and then enlarging them using a grid method. She might use a photo to reference details like the texture of animal fur, but mostly Hart relies on her knowledge of anatomy and her memory.

“I love painting a visual puzzle,” says Hart, who admits that the meaning of some paintings come to her after she has composed them. In Twiga’s Puzzle, lattices of giraffe spots overlap, and elongated necks interweave with the body of a child. At its root, the painting is about conflict resolution.

When she was an art student in Germany during the ‘60’s and ‘70s, Hart says her realist painting style came under criticism from colleagues. “Back then, it was all about abstract expressionism,” she says. Since she was compelled to produce realist work, Hart went on to work as a graphic designer and illustrator knowing her realist style wouldn’t be questioned in that arena.

Later, after raising two children, Hart began studying art at the Art Students League of New York City. There, she learned the traditional methods of figurative, portraiture, still life and landscape painting. Hart’s work of that time reflects her love for the figure and for classical realism.

Back then, she would get into costume and sit in front of a mirror to paint herself. Or, on occasion, she wore a suit fashioned of aluminium foil (she once surprised the postman in it).

These days, Hart lives with her husband in Hendersonville. She moved to the area in 2007 following many years in suburban New York City. In her opinion, the Smoky Mountains complete a cycle in her life: “There is something about the clear mountain air and vista that instantly had me back in my childhood home on the edge of the Great Rift Valley of Africa,” she says.

To see more of Hart’s work, check out www.veronikahart.com.