Ke-abetswe (a self portrait)

Artist's Inner Monologue:

This painting is my first , perhaps only fully completed self-portrait. Not because I haven’t tried before, but because confronting oneself on canvas is far more difficult than it seems. Learned it’s not just about capturing likeness, but facing the person you are, the person you fear you are and the person others imagine you to be, all at once. So in this piece, I gathered and stitched together fragments of myself pulled from different phases of my life, reflecting on the evolving nature of identity. Each section of the face, geometric layer, is a visual metaphor, like my relationship with music not just as something I enjoy, but as something deeply wired into my thinking, processing and emotional language, my interests in science,logic and philosophy. Through this portrait, I also confronted the discomfort of how I am perceived and the quiet acceptance that everyone carries their own version of me coloured by who they are. I think in a way, this work is not a resolution but a snapshot of reconciliation between self-image and self-truth, memory and presence, emotion and intellect.