Saoli, Winston

Winston Saoli was born in 1950 and died in 1995, at the young age of 45. Winston Saoli’s father, the Rev. Russell Saoli, was the headmaster of the Arthurseat Lower Primary School in Acornhoek when Winston was born in 1950. He was the second of six children. Saoli’s education began at his father’s school and he attended the Morris Isaacson School in Moroka when the family moved to Soweto in 1963. Here he was exposed to a variety of influences, and opportunities became available for him to develop his talent. The first artist to encourage and mentor him was Ephraim Ngatane (1938–1971). Bill Hart of the Jubilee Art Centre recalls his and Ezrom Legae’s first meeting with Saoli in July 1968, when he showed them his work with a view to enrolling at the Centre. Hart recalled: " The talent was there only waiting to blossom". It was a surprising testament to Saoli’s determination and hard work, as well as the encouragement of his teachers, that within a year his work had improved so markedly that he was given his first solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. It was a sell-out, and in the same year his work was featured on the Contemporary African Art exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in London. At the age of only 19 years a successful artistic career seemed assured, and he was even showing a tentative interest in sculpture. His work, vacillating between different influences, then moved completely away from the influences and style of his Jubiliee Art Centre mentors. His mixed-media abstractions, using brighter, primary colors and a translucent layering of shapes and linear, figurative elements, resulted in works of a pseudo-mystical nature, which commercial galleries now punt as his finest work. In 1992 Saoli’s alliance with the artist Peter Sibeko, who ran the Soweto Gallery, brightened his prospects but continued what can only be termed as his trajectory of artistic decline. This was speeded, perhaps, by the extravagant praise of his work generated in circles keen to commercialize his reputation with sympathetic art-buying tourists. In 1993, on the eve of the advent of a new dispensation in South Africa, Saoli was diagnosed with cancer. He died on 20 May 1995, heartbreakingly alone and destitute. However - The beauty and the uniqueness of his art keeps living on.