Notes

Alfred Thoba is best known for his narrative paintings featuring richly detailed paint treatments. These two aspects of his paintings – image and technique – are indivisible. Thoba never discussed his influences or professional associations, but his time-honed style has many precedents. Thoba’s vivid iconography and moral vision recall George Pemba at his most allegorical and exuberant, as well as Trevor Makhoba, a painter of complex moral fables. Thoba’s flattened picture planes and simplified detailing of his subjects have precedents in African-American modernists like painters Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence, too. His tendency to crowd human figures into theatrically arranged painterly space recalls the pictorial design of medieval Christian altarpieces.

These correspondences should not detract from a key fact: Thoba was an autodidact who in 1974, at age 23, declared himself a full-time artist.¹ Little is known of his early work. Matsemela Manaka, Steven Sack and Gavin Younge do not mention him in their books from the 1980s. Thoba first achieved public notice in 1988 when he exhibited a stylised interpretation of the 1976 Soweto uprising in Johannesburg. Painted in flat, bold colours a year earlier, 1976 Riots presents a clustering of five black figures in a rudimentary landscape. The political subject matter marked a shift from the erotic themes of Thoba’s earlier work. The eroticism endured, but was increasingly complemented by a social vision marked by themes of gregarious companionship, moral conflict and – in this genial scene – religious devotion.

Thoba’s work of quiet abundance depicts two seated figures in front of a house swaddled by a large-leaf tree, flanked at left by a child gesturing to domestic animals. The title infers any number of Christian scriptures referring to God’s grace. Thoba’s non-naturalistic style of painting prompted some critics to characterise him as an outsider artist. Elza Miles likened his Christian themes to those of polio-stricken Calvin Lekoane, who painted with his feet.² Esmé Berman likened Thoba to Tommy Motswai and Clifford Mpai.³ There are certainly similarities in their pictorial approach, but Mpai worked with pencil, while Thoba is noted for his painterly technique. 'It is obsessive, time-consuming work, and the quality of his attention to detail is clearly reflected in the intricacies and nuances of the finely teased paint.'⁴

^1. Hayden Proud (2006) Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, Pretoria: UNISA Press, page 266.
^2. Elza Miles (1997) Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Art, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, page 121.
^3. Esmé Berman (1993) Painting in South Africa, Cape Town: Southern Book Publishers, page 358.
^4. Rory Bester (2022) ‘Artist Focus: Alfred Thoba – Separate, and Outside’, in The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection (Strauss & Co catalogue), page 40.