Talented pen artist
WHEN as a tweenie Samukelo Gasa used to vandalise mommy’s walls with crayons and ink, he would inevitably get spanked hard for his trouble.
At other times, he would use chalk to draw on the walls and deny it, but by then everyone knew who was responsible.
Now 29, Gasa is a civil engineer by day and a talented self-taught artist by night. He is finally honing his love for art, which he had to squash as his high school in Sweetwaters, Pietermaritzburg, did not offer the subject.
In the past year Gasa has become a bit of a social media darling with his charcoal, graphite, paint or ballpoint-pen drawings. He only started ballpoint drawings earlier this year.
Now he is one of 20 of the best ballpoint-pen artists competing for a R50 000 prize in the BIC Pen Art Master Talent Search competition.
It appears to have become a two-horse race between Gasa and Cape Town’s Themba Mkhangeli, who are both ahead in the votes by a mile.
The competition, which is determined by public vote, has become a face-off between the two, as they lead with at least 2 000 votes each, while others are in the low hundreds.
Both have used social media to spearhead their campaigns.
Gasa said that art was his passion, despite his 9-to-5 job as an engineer at Transnet. During his primary school days, he got his first big chance when he was given a blank wall to draw on to show his talents and “gloss up the school”.
But when he went to high school, his artistic talent took a back seat as his school didn’t offer art. Instead, he focused on the conventional science and engineering stream subjects and ended up studying engineering at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
“I carried on pursuing engineering but my passion never died, so I decided to go back and fulfil my passion,” he said.
While he was finishing his degree, he started drawing again and published his work on social media. People and some galleries started commissioning