Johannesburg - When his father died, Richard Ramotoana Mokgomme was barely five.
As is so often the case in our tradition of extended families, it was left up to the maternal side of his family to raise the child.
“I never went to crèche,” he recalls, “which I now think of as a blessing in disguise.”
When other children trudged off to school, he was bundled outside to play, mostly on his own.
His playground was near the plough fields, so he would watch the old women with hoes on their way to till the land. The women were not shod, and the footprints they left in the sand took a while to fade.
“I started tracing these footprints, like drawings in the sand.”
For a boy of his age and background growing up in a village – Indermark, near Bochum in Limpopo – this was an engrossing pastime. He looked forward to embossing the footprints every workday.
“That’s where my art developed. In 1996 when I started school, I saw a new medium – paper. I then transferred those pre-school images onto paper.”
He chuckles at this memory: “They would soon realise that in my schoolbook, schoolwork started at the front, and from the back I’d do my art. So, the two met somewhere in the middle. I never stopped since then.”
As luck would have it, “the primary school I went to had a teacher by the name of Simon Moshapo”. He taught art as a school subject. He also gave history.
Moshapo would have a big influence on the young learner. “He used stencils, and we had a metal chalkboard. He drew images of Jan van Riebeeck on the board. That’s where I also knew to tell a story using visuals.”
Mokgomme was going somewhere, fast. In 2002 he won a certificate, having come out tops in the whole region.
This would be the first of many awards. Unfortunately, high school was not so much an art space.
“But I continued. Until I finished.”
He then trekked to Johannesburg, going straight to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, to do printmaking – monograph and lithograph.
Coming to the big city, he says, was only two-dimensional: to do art or go bust.
“I learnt a lot at the art gallery, since 2012,” Mokgomme says, looking back. But he momentarily had to take a detour forced on him by life: he went to work to earn money.
As fate would have it, he bumped into renowned artist Khehla Chepape Makgato in 2015 “quite by chance”.
His life changed.
“I checked him out on social media, found he was indeed an artist, recognised. He hosted an exhibition on Marikana at the City Library. I went there. My mind was made up.”
Through Chepape’s help, the young creative was invited to study at the Artist Proof Studio – “it is like a college in printmaking. Moved from Newtown to Braamfontein. I got enrolled but opted for part-time studies. The following year, though, I went full- time for the three-year course.
“I love ‘found objects’. I remembered that I did not know my father. All I had was a copy of his ID that I took from my mother’s purse. The picture was faded in the green ID. He took it in 1994 and he died just after.”
His father’s ID is the canvas of a lot of his work. It suits his style as he studied lithograph.
The name Tshwene Alex Mogome features everywhere on his artwork and sculptures.
Like many black folk, the family name was spelled wrong in his father’s ID, taking away from his true identity.
“But I never complained,” says the son, “I used artistic licence to play around the misspelling. Many people have their surnames mutilated at Home Affairs. My father was not the first, nor the last.”
He uses the word “concepts” a lot. History and politics, colonisation, identity, land, xenophobia and imaginary borders dividing Africa.
His works derive from ideas he conceptualises. “Like cattle dying after eating Pampers and plastics.”
He also uses bones in his sculptures, says the artist whose grandparents were traditional healers. Using bones has deep meaning for him.
At the time of this interview, Mokgomme was rushing to finish an order from banking giant Absa.
He does not have a steady clientele, yet. He ascribes the dearth of regular buyers to ignorance.
“The youth, are they interested in history?” he wonders.
He takes his craft seriously. “This is the role of the artist in society. This is what I enjoy doing, provoking people, making them uncomfortable.”
Last year he won a merit award in the US, but could not go to receive it in person. A Thami Mnyele Award has pride of place on the wall of his Selby, Johannesburg, studio.
The names of Gerard Sekoto and Dumile Feni roll off freely from his speech. He mentions them as the lodestars he tries to emulate but he wants his own distinct signature, he says.
His idols made people uncomfortable with their art.
This article was first used in The Sentinel