Nathaniel Ntwayakgosi 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. Read More…
