Midnight Thoughts of the Nguni Owl

Original oil on canvas SOLD
A limited run of large format prints is available here

There’s no such thing as an Nguni owl.
Or at least not until now.

African sculptors have a knack of capturing the essence of ‘owl’ in wood and stone with no reference to any actual bird, other than a generic mental image.

A Platonic owl, if you will, given African expression. Which also is where this one began. Feathered horns became cattle horns, and the splash of colour across them lent a sense of Nguni markings. The dark galaxy across the background is in fact our own Milky Way as captured by the Meerkat radio telescope in the Karoo, inverted by the astronomers and becoming art in the process.