FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
ASK anyone who knows anything about Trevor Makhoba’s art where his best paintings can be found, and you’ll be told to look not in the myriad institutions and public collections that house his work, but in the township of Umlazi.
It was here, before this area of KwaZulu-Natal became one of South Africa’s most notorious killing fields, that the Cato Manor-born and Umlazi-bred Makhoba became a door-to-door saleman, flogging his art to make ends meet, often for as a little as R5 per painting. Today some of his works sell for a thousand times their original price.
“I never dreamed that one day I would receive this kind of recognition,” says the 1996 winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Fine Art, whose achievements in the last four years include winning the 1991 Natal Biennale and participating in the 1991 Cape Town Triennale and the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Makhoba’s artistic trajectory was, he says, inspired by his mother who guided the self-taught artist until her death 20 years ago.
“She would criticise my charcoal drawings when I was a little boy and I remember, when I was seven years old, how proud she was when I managed to sell one of my clay oxen. She inspired me to be what I am,” says the deeply religious artist whose passions are focused on his family, art and music with equal ardour.
But it was only six years ago that Makhoba decided to commit himself to art on a full-time basis. Since then his lyrical oil paintings and graphics oozing allegory and mythological allusions have been hailed in informed circles as the products of “one of the most brilliant young visual artists in KwaZulu-Natal”.
According to Alan Crump, chairman of the Standard Bank Festival committee, Makhoba possesses an “astounding abiliy to draw and handle oils”. In March 1994, art writer Andrew Solomon described his work in the New York Times as truly “remarkable”. He added, however, that Makhoba was curiously unaware of the Western art tradition, and unable to place or value his own pictures.
As Makhoba himself admits. His creative imperatives derive from his immediate environment, the daily struggle of surviving in a war-torn province, and the strength that is needed to endure both physical and spiritual hardship. Looking at his work, you cannot deny the charm of his vision nor the richness of his visual metaphors. References to myth and ritual abound, as do his endearingly idiosyncratic statements about relationships and sexuality.
Yet the works seem curiously disengaged from the socio-political circumstances in which they are produced. Stylised, stiff and formulaic, his images seem frozen in an immutable Never Never Land, offering little in the way of critical exploration.
Within a specific folksy genre — and given Makhoba’s limited frames of reference — his paintings are remarkable. But when you place his work alongside other Standard Bank Young Artist Award recipients — such as Sam Nhlengethwa — who might have started out working within a similar genre but have since developed a greater critical reassessment and redefinition of art-making, you run the risk of making simplistic equivalents between artists who essentially have nothing in common other than skin tone and heritage.
“In the fine arts, we have an extremely wide berth of candidates from which to choose. Therefore, we try to be as inclusive as possible and not to leave out any discipline or medium,” explains Crump. “This award inevitably involves taking risks. Each year, our award recipients bring with them a unique set of needs and problems which we must accommodate.”
He adds: “Makhoba’s art has progressed so remarkably well, given his disdvantaged circumstances, and hopefully this award will provide the support and incentives for further development. In his case we couldn’t say: Wait until you get a higher education in art and then come to us ‘, but chose to recognise where he is at now, and to try and faciliate his future success.”