Mashile is an increasingly acclaimed painter, but he thinks and talks like a writer, argues Oliver Roberts Some artists are fortunate because they're able to employ paint and a canvas to confront past traumas and move on, thus saving them lots and lots of money on psychotherapy. Colbert Mashile is one such artist.As a 10-year-old boy in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, Mashile underwent initiation rituals involving painful circumcision and all other manner of traditional boy-to-man ceremonies that no 10-year-old could possibly comprehend or be comfortable with.The result, barely two decades later, was a series of works alluding to those experiences. It was these paintings, with their subversive themes and dream-like imagery, that established Mashile as an artist of repute and setting him on a career path born from a place of fear and pain and confusion.story_article_left1Now 43, Mashile is a much happier man, but that original intensity, and intent, still burns. When I meet him at the Art Eye Studio near inner-Jozi's Doornfontein, he is relaxed and faintly shy.At his permanent studio just down the road (in a building that houses other artists, including Diane Victor) he is at work on a new collection that will be shown at Circa at the end of January.Mashile pretty much abandoned the phallic, initiation-themed works a while ago but surrealism still dominates his expression, as do the characters he creates, author-like, to live in his work and tell stories from his subconscious."As I started to get more educated, I felt in touch with the world around me in a more critical way so I used the same characters to tell more stories," Mashile says. "The initiation phase has come and gone a long time ago, but the characters are still popping in and the feel of the landscape remains."I've always preferred to place my characters in a landscape setting because, in many ways, I don't see the city as a place of belonging. In my subconscious, in my conscious even, the city is a place for the outside; the inside belongs somewhere else."It's then that Mashile seems to depart the scene here at the studio. Seriously: some part of his psyche ascends and goes somewhere else. He talks about dreams. He talks about how, when he dreams, he never dreams about the city. No, he dreams about the place of his upbringing, the trees and rivers and clouds, the open space. The greenery of Mpumalanga, the quiet drizzle of the place - this, Mashile says, is who he is.Mashile likes to talk about intuition. Like any artist, it took him a while to understand how to work on pure instinct, to understand that the subconscious is where all great art comes from."I believe all the information is inside you and, as you are consistently working and working it happens naturally that the mould breaks and then you become yourself," Mashile says.Mashile reckons a good indicator that you're getting things right is when somebody else looks at your work and sees things that even you don't see in it.It's why Mashile doesn't like to talk an awful lot about his work. Not formally at least. For him, it's like trying to describe a nonsensical dream you had - sometimes there just aren't the words."I think it's best to leave the audience to gather their own interpretation of my work because, for me, it's very hard to pinpoint, in verbal terms, what it is I'm trying to say. I can give you snippets of the story but the overall narrative on the picture is, I don't know really, it's intuitive, just driven by whatever I was feeling at the time."full_story_image_hleft1Narrative. Character. Story. Mashile is an artist but he often appears to think like a writer. Back in Mpumalanga, he grew up on stories his mother told him, fables about animals, each with their own personality and foibles. Goat. Pig. Rabbit. Donkey. Horse. Baboon. In Mashile's world, these come out in half-human forms, playing at being politicians and/or other nefarious social influences.Of the artists I've been meeting in the past couple of months, the likes of Kenya's Cyrus Kabiru and 2015 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Mohau Modisakeng have both expressed their frustrations with the way African art and the artist in Africa are written, spoken and thought about. Their issue is that there is a distinction between "African art' or an "African artist" and the rest of the world. Kabiru put it best when he said: "I am not an African artist, I am an artist from Africa."All artists are driven by the same desire - to decipher their thoughts and experiences and express the world they live in, to the world they live in. So why this need to point out that an artist is black? And why do some Africans, South Africans (black and white) somehow think that what they have to say about their own country and continent is less important than the opinion of someone in Europe or America?"The most important thing for an artist, anywhere, is to find his or her voice," Mashile says. "As students, we're influenced by established artists and we begin to mimic them in many ways, even in thoughts. A lot of artists look at what's happening in the rest of the world - and that's important of course - but when you start to mimic blatantly what's happening in, say, New York, it becomes meaningless here."I think a sense of place is very important. We can try to be worldly in many ways, but a sense of place is what created your thoughts, your world view, everything. And that's all down to a sense of place, not a sense of black or white."We are culturally very rich and we're hungry to tell the world who we are because we were in the dark for ages and we've got unique things to say. But we tend to look down and think that the school of thought in Africa is weak and that there are no big critics here who can sort of question what we're doing here and take us forward. We always look up to already established things, but we need to remain firm in ourselves and have a voice."..