19 Sep 2018

One of Botswana’s most promising artist, Frank de Painter, is working on his ninth collection. 

 He is already boasting of eight collections at his young age since he broke unto the scene in 2009 after he completed his Form 5.

Having not done well with his school leaving examinations, Frank Mabotowe, aka Frank de Painter, was faced with a challenge of making something of himself and putting food on his plate.

With a gift in art and a never say die attitude, the young Tlokweng lad has been making waves with his paintings and signature name of Frank de Painter.

This year alone, he has already done a collection that was titled; This is my story hosted at Thapong Visual Arts Centre along with a couple of his colleagues, and he is working on another one that will make it ninth in total since he started doing collections.

“Immediately after my group exhibition this year I started working on my new collection titled; Art is hell of a drug and the reason I called it art is hell of a drug is because I feel art is like taking drugs, once you are hooked on art you are hooked forever and in a positive way,” he said.

Frank said understanding art was knowing art and what his latest titled collection was communicating was that instead of doing the actual drugs, people should get hooked on art.

“How this title came about is that I was watching a Rick James interview about how he and the Murphy brothers used to get high on cocaine back in the 80’s and ended up doing some crazy stuff. At the end of the interview he said “cocaine is hell of a drug then he laughed.” 

I don’t know why he laughed but that made me think of a picture I had on my phone that read; Don’t buy cocaine-buy art, and I took all of that and flipped it then came up with my collection title: “Art is hell of a drug which is my 9^th art collection and it will consist of 60 artworks,” continued Frank.

Speaking further on some of the collections he has done, Frank said his first collection was titled; Art of mona-dilo which was released in 2009. 

“Then I was still finding myself as a painter, but then in 2012 I created another one called; The A.R.T of painting which I went on to exhibit at the No1 Ladies Coffee House and it was my first solo exhibition,” he said.

He indicated that it got a lot of positive feedback and was also featured on Btv’s Sedibeng show and other local newspapers.

Frank said the media exposure helped him a lot and the commission he made from it contributed immensely to his other collection titled This Is Art which he did in 2014.

“Later on in the same year I made my second solo exhibition at Alliance Françoise de Gaborone titled; This is A.R.T exhibition. The success of this exhibition made me work even harder and I did other collections like; That’s art, Purple print-story of my life, Purple print-reloaded, Purple print-redefined and The definition of art amongst others,” he said. ENDS