NATHANIEL MOKGOSI OIL ON BOARD

NATHANIEL MOKGOSI OIL ON BOARD UNFRAMED, SIZE 80CM BY 60CM 

Nathaniel Mokgosi

In 1965, at the age of 19, Nat Mokgosi, having completed his schooling, became a member of the Ricky and the Diamonds pop group. The following year he enrolled at the Jubilee Art Centre in Johannesburg for a year. He subsequently spent some time teaching at the Open School in Johannesburg before launching his career as a full-time artist in 1970.

The influence of Ezrom Legae (1939–1999) (qv.), under whom he studied at the Jubilee Art Centre, is a strong, underlying feature of his work. Mokgosi has however synthesised from his teacher and other diverse sources an idiom that is uniquely his own. African legends, the Bible as well as Greek mythology fired his visual imagination. Stylistically, to some extent, the cross-hatching of forms in the work of Judith Mason (b.1938) were also internalised by Mokgosi via Legae’s own adaptations of her technique.1 A concern of Legae’s work that Mokgosi continues to some degree is the concept of animism; the mystic union between man and animal, which was also explored by Dumile Feni (qv.). This is seen in many of Mokgosi’s works, for example his mixed media work The Flight of Nku (1978) in the University of Fort Hare Collection.2

Mokgosi has recalled the insistence of Legae on close observation in his life-drawing classes, and his demand that students reflect the dynamic links of tension and equilibrium between the parts of the human body, even when in repose.3 If it was an understanding of form that Mokgosi learned from Legae, then it was Bill Hart who taught him about the expressive power of colour. In his work it took the form on one hand of dramatic light-dark contrasts, or, on the other, of the infinite nuances possible with creative mixing of the primary colours with black and white. The use of the white surface of his support also made possible the generation of subtle luminosities through the application of colour in transparent layers.

Elza Miles notes in her recent book, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre, that from the late 1950s onwards many Johannesburg artists, Mokgosi included, showed an interest in religious subjects, either as a result of church commissions or as independent expressions.4 Mokgosi’s powerful and dynamic Crucifixion etching of 1971 (plate 217) in the Campbell Smith Collection is one of the latter and is one of his rare ventures into this medium. Religious subjects, particularly those reflecting suffering and redemption, acted as powerful metaphors for expressions of frustration, resistance and hope in the face of the incipient cruelty that lay at the heart of South Africa’s unjust apartheid policies. The ambiguity inherent in some of the animist-inspired imagery in Mokgosi’s work is often inspired by the chance and ambivalent appearances of objects in everyday life. This was an aspect that Legae encouraged his students to take seriously in their study of nature. This Crucifixion etching was, according to a recent interview, generated by Mokgosi’s seeing a pair of worker’s overalls dangling from a tree.5 The resulting etching shows a figure conjoined to Christ’s body, apparently sharing the same pair of legs. This has been confirmed by the artist as his expression of the union between Christ and his followers. This finds theological justification in the Christian notion that all true believers are members of Christ’s body.

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