The image of a versatile artist
In painting, filmmaker and actor Mmabatho Montsho found a different medium to express the need to create, propelled by urgent messages that haunted her from the other side. She spoke to Milisuthando Bongela about her paintings of Methodist Church women
ANgaka. I am both. I practise the African religion as understood through Bo Sometime late last year, in the dead of night, the image came to me. Like it was haunting me, it would not go away. First I thought it was a demand for a story, a script and so I wrote the script, thinking I will find peace. But the image was still there, haunting.
I started to sketch it on paper and only then did I find peace. Like that, one thing led to the other. So, in a way, it was not so much the focus of my eye but a struggle with an image that was haunting me. Although the struggle to find peace with an image that was haunting me ended up in a painting, the truth is, in my head, it was never about documenting something of an experience of people out there, black women in particular. I don’t deny that it could be read that way. In any way.
I’m not a stranger to those experiences. I have interacted intimately with those experiences. The women in my family have always been worshippers themselves.
I always want to give the observer of my work the freedom to decide what the image does to them. That is the way of the artist.
But I couldn’t say I was documenting experiences that I had come across as much as documenting a struggle with an image that was haunting me.
This is expressed in the painting by how I isolate them, often in empty canvases so that they are not read in relation to objects but rather in their relationship either with themselves, with each other and with the frame. a colour of fire that represents renewal. Red is also a colour with political connotations.
Something is to be said about a group of women wearing the colour red in religious attire. While colours like blue, green and yellow may represent calm serenity and peace, red oozes action, passion, courage, daring, audacity and also truth. And those are the most-needed qualities today. tle to do with experiences that I’m transposing into the frame, or that I am documenting. It is for me the release of an image that was haunting me. I was chasing peace.
As a filmmaker, I appreciate how a medium can change or influence how we perceive things, so I find your observation intriguing.
Again, depending on our own experiences, we will look at the images and feel and see a whole universe that will differ from one person to the other. The power of an artwork is precisely that I must surrender it to be experienced in that individuality. So your reading of “our mothers” into it is a gift I thank you for. I have always been interested in fine art. I have taken art classes since primary school and, in my high school years, art history as well. So I have always painted. I wouldn’t say this is my coming-out work.
I have never exhibited or sold any of my work, nothing like that. I have always painted because I am drawn to resolve a struggle that I might have with images, stories, thoughts, feelings and experiences. I have also given away paintings as gifts to loved ones.