Buffalo and Bird

A crescent moon hangs in a night sky scattered with hand-painted stars, watching over golden buffalo as they wander through dark trees and tangled grasses. A little bird flits between the branches, a snail rests curled on the ground, and slender creatures slip through the brush below. Painted in warm earthy tones against a deep blue-grey evening, the scene captures the quiet feeling of an African night using simple shapes and honest color.

The work is by Edward Saidi Tingatinga, a Tanzanian artist whose name became the label for a whole style of painting. Born in 1932, he started making art in the late 1960s in Dar es Salaam, working with bicycle paint on small squares of board because those were the materials he could afford. His bold animals and cheerful backgrounds quickly found an audience, and though he died young in 1972, his students kept the style alive. Tingatinga painting remains among the most recognizable art to emerge from East Africa.

Part of the charm here comes from Tingatinga being largely self-taught. His pictures have a flat, decorative feel that leans more toward storytelling than realism. These buffalo are not anatomically exact, but they carry a certain personality, and the sprinkling of stars overhead lends the whole scene a soft, dreamlike calm.