Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

SINCE WE LAST VISITED WITH DAVID LANGMEAD, the painter who has adopted the Great Karoo as his home, seems to have achieved a new level of power in his brushstrokes.

He and his wife, Bronwen, live near the end of a long dirt road coming from two directions.  While this, by itself, may not seem extraordinary, the country lane wending past their home into the middle of nowhere is located in the Sneeuberg mountains of interior South Africa.

The Langmeads and their young children inhabit an old converted sheep shed in Nieu Bethesda, a frontier-era village, population 50 that has attracted a remarkable group of painters, poets and writers.  From their humble porch rises an opulent view of jagged Compassberg, a serene and sometimes snow-crowned peak that lords over the Great Karoo.  

Beyond the mere thirty paces it me to cross their backyard, the bush begins. It's a landscape that could easily be mistaken for the arid American West, the gaucho hinters of Argentina's Patagonia, or the frontier of Mongolia.

But moving across the expansive rockyveld amid dancing cloud shadows and ancient corridors of the nomadic bushmen, are troops of baboons and vervet monkeys, cobras and vipers, leopards, black springboks, klipspringers, mountain zebras, tortoises, bat-eared foxes, duiker, black eagles, reedbuck and black-backed jackals.

One day as he was leaving his studio a skittish pair of kudu and an aardvark were spotted just on the other side of the fenceline.


 The Great...