The images appear to him in dreams, but his paintings often look more like nightmares. There are swirling, phantom-like apparitions without eyes…Naked and heavily pregnant figures with the heads of men but the bodies of women, with bloated breasts, oversized teeth and hands that claw into the distance…Automatic rifles, clenched fists and attack dogs with scarlet eyes…Severed heads wearing crowns and smiling malevolently…All painted in frantic brushstrokes, mostly using shades of grey, black, white, blue, red and yellow.
“I dream about beings that are in human form, but they are not of this world. I don’t know what they are but they haunt me,” said Blessing Ngobeni. “They are scary, always chasing me, trying to catch me. Some carry swords. Some carry crosses. Some they have got four legs, but they are standing like a human….”
Last year Ngobeni won one of South Africa’s most prestigious art prizes, the Reinhold Cassirer Award, sponsored by his compatriot and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Nadine Gordimer. Some critics compare his work to that of world famous Spanish artist, Joan Miro. Like Miro, the South African’s creations are intensely surrealistic.
Ngobeni said as much as he tries to forget his nocturnal horrors, whenever he picks up a paintbrush, they return.
“Then I lay them out in my work; they infect my work,” he told VOA in his studio that was once an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of inner city Johannesburg.
The infection he speaks of is perhaps a product of his past.
Ngobeni was a toddler when his mother left him in the care of an uncle in their home village in Limpopo province in northern South Africa. He never knew his father.
“My uncle wanted me to look after his cattle so he denied me to go to school,” he recalled. “If a cow jumped and kicked the jug that holds the milk he wouldn’t kick the cow, he’d kick me. He was always screaming at me and assaulting me.”
To escape the abuse, Ngobeni fled into the bush. “I became totally isolated and antisocial. I became an animal,” he said. “I was living that life of saying, ‘Now I am scared of human beings.’ Whenever I see a person I would like run away; I was surviving by stealing [food] from around there….”
After four years as a “scavenging bush sleeper” Ngobeni got a lift on a truck to Alexandra, a sprawling, impoverished township in Johannesburg. He was 10.
“I happened to become a street kid, sleeping in the street…. Life was hard. I was starving a lot of the time. Some things that happened to me then, I can’t talk about them,” said Ngobeni.
He admitted, “To get money I’d break into cars and steal things to sell, to survive.”
Then, when Ngobeni was 14, an event occurred that changed the course of his life.
“This other friend of mine was exposed to some advanced [criminal] tools, like guns. Then he was like, ‘Hey man! Let’s do it, let’s do it….’”
Armed with pistols, he and his gang tried to rob a gas station.
“This friend of mine tried to scare the workers so he fired his gun into the air and that alerted people and soon the police were there. We tried to get away – only to find out that the guy with the [getaway] car had driven away when he heard the gunshot….”
The police arrested Ngobeni and his accomplices. He was convicted of various criminal charges and spent almost six years in prison.
“With the life I lived as a youngster, I can’t believe I’m 29 now. If I had carried on living the way I was, there were three things around the corner: life in a wheelchair, life in prison…or death,” he said. “A lot of my friends, they died. They got killed because of trying to rob people, trying to hijack cars….”
But jail did not imprison Ngobeni. It freed him.
To escape the daily drudgery of jail, and also the violence of life in prison, where he once saw a fellow inmate nearly killed for “a bit of dagga [marijuana],” Ngobeni began drawing.
“The first thing I remember sketching was a bird I had seen outside my cell. From then on I was obsessed with sketching. From there I fell in love [with art]. I used art to free my mind.”
It was in prison that Ngobeni started to dream “like never before.” He said at first his dreams scared him, but later he learned to “listen to them” and to use them to inspire his art.
“I model my painting on that of the Nguni people [some of South Africa’s original peoples]. They painted in patterns, in layers. I layer my work. It’s a process. It takes me stage by stage, up until I am satisfied to say, ‘This work is complete….’”
But for Ngobeni completion is not the same as perfection – a concept he shuns.