Kevin Thomas

Biography

Zimbabwean born (1950) my entire working career has been in the Southern African wildlife field. Art has always been an exceedingly important part of my life, although the 1960s British colonial schooling system in the then Rhodesia (pre-Zimbabwe), had it that if you weren't good at maths you'd be useless at art. Thus I wasn't in an 'A' stream where art was taught. However, and since schools days I've 'dabbled' and limped along the self taught path. My early attempts at using oils ended in 'mud' - we had no YouTube tutorials or fantastic informative magazines like Leisure Painter or The Artist. I enjoyed brush and ink drawing and still do. Ultimately though, I tried pastels (sticks & pencil) and finally thought I'd found what I was after. Despite having successfully sold a number of paintings over the years, during the early 2000s I unfortunately developed a nasty allergy to pastel dust. Forced to stop using them I stopped doing art altogether. And then in November 2015, after we'd emigrated to the UK and bought a live aboard canal boat, I once more attempted pastels (the black rhino and buffalo on this site) but it wasn't long before I was suffering terribly. The end result was the pastels got packed away and I'm once more 'dabbling' along on a learning curve with water soluble oils and watercolour - work space on the boat being my only real limitation.