It’s the surreal that occupies Rasta’s painting vocation. If you like, call it the undergirding spiritual. Rasta doesn’t paint the visible view; he paints the invisible sense. You can see here how, with Leanne Manas’ portrait, Rasta dug deep to capture the “brown boer” in Leanne: the Debra Patta French Huguenot grit, the Noxolo Grootboom kaffir right-eye glint (when she says “ndinithanda nonke emakhaya”) & Leanne’s own Old World remnants in the New World. Rasta creolized her into a chimera of the broadcasting world. And he added to that, a certain post-race metaphor she likes for her voice and station in Mandela’s rainbow nation. This is the avatar Leanne herself believes she puts on— one by which she handles the world of topical issues and current affairs eMzantsi.
Leanne cannibalized Vuyo Mbuli, in the Oswald de Andradeian, "Cannibalist Manifesto” sense. And she likes to be seen that way, as sharing some filial affect with the Black world, a world she carries in her belly because she ate it (she believes). It doesn’t get to be more rainbow nation of God than this: what Rasta has painted of Leanne Manas.
This is art, in the true sense: something ‘ugly’ yet beautiful or fantastic at the same time. A fitting ode to Rasta, respec man! Like God, Rasta is in the business of creating from nothing. You want Rasta to reproduce your exact facial feature? Try nexdoor.
