[caption id="attachment_220564" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Painter Kate Arthur with her Genna & Felix painting[/caption]
Sanlam Portrait Award winner celebrates marginalised in body of work, writes Nomazima Nkosi.
Former Eastern Cape artist Kate Arthur, now based in Cape Town, is the national winner of the esteemed 2017 Sanlam Portrait Award.
Arthur, 32, won the highly contested award for her painting titled Genna & Felix at a ceremony at the Rust-en- Vrede Gallery in Durbanville, claiming a cool R100000 after triumphing over more than 1400 entries.
Arthur, who grew up in East London, said it took a few days to register that she had won and revealed she’d thought another portrait, which came in second, would win.
“I never thought Genna & Felix would win because the second portrait was less confrontational. Initially, I didn’t even think it [the winning piece] would be accepted and even now, I still don’t know what the broader aspect of winning this competition means to me and my work going forward,” she said.
Genna & Felix is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a couple who identify as “queer”, Arthur said, adding that the piece was part of a larger body of work titled Body Portraits.
She said most of the people she painted identified as “queer” in one form or another. “Queer doesn’t necessarily mean gender but includes sexuality and politics,” she said.
“This particular portrait consists of two people, a couple, and because I think of them as a team, I decided to paint both in one portrait,” said Arthur, who studied fine arts at Rhodes University.
Arthur is committed to representing people who might for various reasons be marginalised, acknowledging their bodies as sites for individual and collective expression of history, politics, and identity.
“I want my work to represent bodies in a beautiful way, but often these bodies have been rejected by society or there might be prejudice again them,” she said.
Her work process consists of taking photos of her subjects first, followed by a discussion on which element they find strongest in the image and taking it from there.
Bodies, particularly the human face and hands, interest Arthur the most.
“Painting and drawing is what I’ve always wanted to do. There was no other option for me,” she said.
Even though she is well on her way to becoming a celebrated artist thanks to the Sanlam accolade, Arthur’s work has received its share of criticism on social media, with some describing it as vulgar.
“There are people who find my work uncomfortable; who don’t want to look at it. People say things on social media and I worry about my subjects because those are their bodies which have been exposed to the world,” she said.
Arthur has been dubbed an activist for the LGBTQ community, something that came about when her work went off in a direction she was not conscious of at the time.
“My Sanlam Portrait Award entry for 2015 was a painting of my partner. It was quite provocative, but it was widely celebrated and there was a surge of positivity around it.
“People recognised themselves; it resonated, and that’s when I realised the work was important,” she said.
- Bay artists Jenny Ord and Lwando Luniko made the top 40 of this year’s Sanlam Portrait Awards. Luniko, 20, from Walmer township, entered two pieces and one – a pencil-on-canvas portrait – was chosen for the top 40. “Making the top 40 means my work is being recognised and, young as I am, I feel like I’ve already won,” Luniko said, adding it was the first time he’d entered. Other Bay artists who reached the top 100 are Galerie Noko curator Usen Obot, Jaco Benade and Liesl Duthie.