My style is influenced by Pointillism and Mosaic. I paint because I want the viewers to somehow relate and be moved by my work. I express my views and opinions on women empowerment and cultural identity, l’m inspired by society and the people I live with.

“Amagugu nenkcubeko” explores the ideas of cultural identity, cultural identity acts as a way to preserve history and provides individuals with a sense of belonging. Our different cultures serve as an invisible bond, which brings us together.

The colors I usually use are to evoke a feeling or certain emotions. This series consists of the mediums of acrylic paint, Gold leaf, fabric and dry Acrylic paint peels, these mediums give different textures and rhythms to ignite emotional reactions. I continually explore different color palettes and color relationships to make my work sing with vibrancy and color and evoke emotions.

The purpose of these portraits is to generate strong emotions and create a sense of beauty. Our heritage is our unique, inherited sense of family identity.

KILMANY-JO LIVERSAGE (b. 1973) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

She creates portraits that sit at the blurry boundary between fine art and graffiti. Adopting the graffiti or Urban art language allows her to update, renew, and challenge the conventions of painting, though her rendering of female subjects is inspired by Renaissance-era portraiture. It also references digitized mass production and a futuristic post-human world. The result is a series of brightly colored large-scale paintings, evoking the street, art history, and the future.

Although Liversage has painted walls all over the world, including a large-scale mural at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she does not consider herself a street artist. Operating within the framework of ‘urban contemporary,’ Liversage may have incorporated aspects of street art into her practice – considerable scale, a predilection for working outside, and the custom of tagging - but she trained as a fine artist, and painting is her committed pursuit. She is a dedicated fine art painter. She is faithful to Renaissance standards of portraiture, working within the established canon, taking into account the very same compositional considerations as da Vinci or Piero della Francesca. BUT, she breaks the mold, allowing for spontaneity of mark-making, for dripping, and for glorious, generative chaos. She is the anarchist who comes to mess with the process, revealing in her rebellion the truth of the matter – the uselessness and the peril, for women, of coloring within the patriarchal lines.

In Liversage’s work, the masculine Gaze, to which all feminine is subject within a patriarchal framework, is plain to see. However, revealed as self-portraits, the feminine, cast in the roles given to her by the Gaze, stares knowingly, ferociously, straight back. Few artists can capture a moment or an expression as confidently as Kilmany-Jo Liversage does. On top of that, each painting is an act of rebellion. There is the classic and “correct” represented by the classical portrait elements, and then there is her saying that the status quo needs to change or be better and that those who traditionally had not been respected or valued are equally important and relevant. This is expressed by her use of a hip-hop aesthetic. Her ability to combine the two elements into one powerful artwork makes that statement.

She has the following to say about her still-life paintings: “I paint flowers as a reference to the objectification of women. Flowers are supposed to bring beauty and color to a space, and often women are expected to do the same. Women are put under pressure to be beautiful. Even on social media, we find apps designed to enhance certain feminine features. So in these still-life paintings, I subtly add elements referring to women as objects of adornment. This is not a bunch of flowers. It is my take on flowers.”