If you squint with your left eye and close the right, illuminate that painting with a torch and look at it from a 45º angle, it still looks nothing like Mama Winnie Madikizela- Mandela.
Dear Lebani Sirenje, you are not at fault for loving something that doesn’t love you back.
Many a man and woman have been in toxic unions that left them burned, bruised and brutalised.
Tugging at the heart strings sometimes means a javelin has been flung at your abdomen, ripping open your ribcage while being dragged back on a rope by the apple of your eye.
Social media has voted; portrait painting doesn’t love you.
She seeks the attention of photorealism, who couldn’t be bothered. You are the rebound.
She only sticks around because you are devoted.
I heard through the paint vines that abstract art is single and was asking about you.
Lebani Sirenje, you are a modern Sisyphus. But you don’t push a rock up a hill for it to come crumbling down.
You rock up at memorials, start painting and the social media comes crumbling down on you.
Like he from whom you are incarnated, you too are punished for your self-aggrandizing craftiness.
This boulder up a hill always rolls down when it nears the top, repeating this action for eternity.
Acrylic, watercolour, alkyds or oil: there isn’t a way you haven’t seen other artists work to understand the Facebook and Twitter turmoil.
Your work is not easy on the eye. But it goes beyond that for you, doesn’t it?
Yes, portrait painting is your kryptonite. But you are not willing to stop being Superman, are you?
You are breathing for the sole purpose of applying paint, pigment, colour to a solid surface.
Your inhale and exhale through your fingertips when they caress a paintbrush, don’t you?
You are in pursuit of painting the human figure and face and are not bound by laws inherent in painting a person’s likeness with mere obstacles likes accuracy in the depiction, are you?
Your Filbert strokes throw caution to the wind.
Stiff bristles from your Brights dive into uncharted waters without testing their depth with both feet.
That Flat brush in your hand knows freedom.
You were never told to colour inside the lines.
Your paintings have no lines. No pencil or chalk outline. Just brush on brush off.
That dreadful painting of Mother of the Nation, may she rest in poetry, wasn’t your first questionable portrait.
You have misdrawn Nelson Mandela Albertina Sisulu gospel stars Lundi Tyamara and Sifiso Ncwane among others who are late.
Your canvas seems to always be dented.
Every single work you have done to honour heroes looked like a few different people, except the intended.
The problem with being a reincarnated form of Sisyphus lies not with you, dear brother.
Even if you lack impressive artists' impression. And your portraits are not true depictions of your subjects.
You have never lied through your art.
Your paintings balance the souls of those whose memories you are attempting to breathe air into through your clumsy paint strokes.
Your art is true in your heart.
The problem with being a recreated form of Sisyphus lies not with you, dear brother.
Humanity is self-loathing. Humanity is savage. We are a breed of beautified mortals consecrated on agreed-upon delusions of perfection.
@Rabbie_Wrote