Opinion - I did this painting in December 2013.
Mandela had just passed away in hospital and, like many South Africans, I battled to make sense of his life and his death.
As usual, I tried to translate my thoughts through drawings that I would eventually use as a basis for a painting.
I did several drawings and, at first, they were pretty ordinary portraits but, as I delved deeper into my mind, I started to ask questions about how I felt about his life and death.
Something within me kept bringing me back to the question: “How can an icon die?”
Usually people become icons after they die but here was a living icon who died.
My mind flew back to the play Woza Albert! which I had seen as a young student. The play was about God coming back to Earth to resurrect his people and it traces his journey through apartheid South Africa in a funny way.
We all laughed and cheered as God eventually resurrected heroes like Albert Luthuli.
Then my mind shot back to the number of times I could have met Mandela in person.
He visited the UDW Hindu Temple in the mid 1990s and I was invited to attend. It was an opportunity to see the man up close for the first time.
I told a friend I had an invitation and he said I was very, very lucky. Now, this friend of mine was an activist who was arrested in the 1970s and imprisoned at Modderbee Prison. Without thinking it through, I gave him the invitation.
He asked me why and I can’t remember what my answer was exactly, but it went something like this: Mandela is not real to me.
He is more like an emotion, more like a symbol! I feared that meeting him would somehow remove that feeling.
The friend looked at me strangely and I tried to explain that sometimes it’s better to carry your own thoughts and ideas of something without being faced with the reality of it.
“That does not make any sense!” he laughed, then added, “but then you are an artist and nothing you say ever makes any sense!”
“How do you meet an icon?” I asked. “It’s like reading a book and creating a movie in your imagination, and then watching the film and being disappointed.
“Or meeting an actor after seeing him in a movie and being disappointed that he looked fairly ordinary”.
He didn’t get it, but he appreciated the invitation.
Around the same time I was teaching a course on Indian aesthetics to final-year students, and I was trying to explain the difference between the ordinary emotive experience and an aesthetic experience.
I explained it as the difference between the sadness one feels on the death of a loved one and the sadness one would feel when someone who means a lot to you but who you don’t know personally dies.
I used Mandela as the example. It is not the same sadness of personal loss, but one that is felt at a depth that is beyond the ego.
Perhaps I didn’t want to deal with reality but, for me, Mandela symbolised something beyond the emancipation of the country: he symbolised moral rectitude that could not be bound by artificial and unnatural national borders that were imposed by colonial powers.
When Mbeki commented about stepping into his shoes by saying something about not liking Mandela’s taste in shoes, I knew that South Africa would progressively move away from the path of caring moral rectitude and on to the path of egotistical and corrupt leadership.
My mind shot back to the icons who symbolised both moral rectitude and caring, and the only example I could think of was Bodhisattva Padmapani (Bodhisattva with the Lotus).
Perhaps I should explain why: the Buddha achieved enlightenment long before he actually died. His death was merely a formality.
Bodhisattvas are buddhas who have achieved nirvana but who consciously remain here to teach others how to achieve enlightenment.
Those who have visited the Ajanta Caves in India might have seen the painting of Bodhisattva Padmapani on the wall of Cave One.
It is a beautiful painting, but what you may not have realised is the creative tension in the work of art, in the way it juxtaposes strength and gentleness.
Think about that for a second: How would you create a painting of a person to show both strength and gentleness at the same time?
These were the thoughts going through my mind as I painted my homage to Mandela. I wanted to paint him being real and spiritual at the same time.
In a strange way, I started to think of what would be heaven for him and what would give him eternal peace.
He is shown sitting on a rock on a hill looking over the pasture where his flock grazes peacefully.
He was a herd boy when he was a young boy. The rock symbolises the Earth but, if you look carefully, it is also the night sky. He is wearing his trademark shirt and sits solidly like a sculpture.
His face is not shown but we see what he is seeing. We see his vision.
We are behind him both because he is the leader and because we still support him.
But let me not explain the painting to you, because I’m sure you will interpret the painting in terms of your own experience of him and find those symbols that suit your interpretation.
So, no, I did not queue to see his body as it lay in state at the Union Buildings. For me, what he symbolises still lives on and can never be destroyed for as long as we give them life.
I think the best way of paying respect to him is to live by his example and teachings despite how difficult that might be today.