User:Makramono/sandbox

About
Makgato Ramono Visual artist Born: 1983, September, 30 South Africa, Soweto, Meadowlands

Background
Makgato ‘Mak’ Ramono is a Johannesburg based artist. Born in Soweto. He was born into a family with a strong artistic and political background. Mak honed his craft at Parktown College in Johannesburg where he studied art and design.

Makgato ‘Mak’ Ramono’s artworks offer an entry point into the variety and richness that lies beneath every face we encounter in life. The blending of techniques across genres is a display of Makgato Ramono’s work, all bearing visible overlap.

For Ramono, the youth epitomise a sense of identity within many contexts, and reflect the construction of identity within our increasingly globalised world. His work is loaded with both historical and aesthetic precedent. Ramono thus translates his own understanding of identity - drawing from images in his daily surrounds.

What lies beneath a face is infinitely more intriguing than its impassive surface may suggest. Ramono narrates the identities and the stories behind black people’s everyday understanding. In probing how we are shaped – and placed – by our identity. He hones in on a group with a rich, complex and often fraught history: the black people.

His subjects may identify with a particular group, but their diversity within that social structure renders them unique. Observing the tension between abstraction and representation. There is a sense of unity conveyed by Ramono’s portraits.

The people he draws or paints evoke a particular quality that appeals to his visual sensitivity, but nothing more in the way of social influence. However, considering the importance of colour to Ramono’s in his artworks, he uses alternative methods that result in a unique fusion with the metallic paints. Ramono continues his visual exploration of identity and its ever changing and emerging nature within South Africa’s psycho-social landscape.. Based in Soweto, Ramono’s process as an artist today remains adaptive, inventive, and physically engaging.

Works
http://makramono.wordpress.com