Sebidi started out as a domestic worker who went on to become an internationally celebrated fine artist. Her works reside in many collections across the world. Sebidi followed the call of creativity and overcame what would seem to be insurmountable obstacles for a black woman artist.

Sebidi was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to the USA and exhibit at the Worldwide Economic Contemporary Artists’ Fund Exhibition. Through it all, she remained a champion of especially rural women, shining the torch on their hardships and triumphs through her art.

The suffering and disruption inflicted by apartheid, especially on women, are common themes in Sebidi’s work, which also evokes spiritual ancestors, rural African objects and the conflict between African belief systems and Western values.

Sebidi uncannily combines the rural and the city, the male and the female, reality and myth. But she could not care less whether people like her art or not, “Whoever likes it will love it, whoever don’t has not been given to love my work. I don’t have to be conscious of whom I’m working for. I have to be happy about what I’m doing,” she tells the 21 Icons team.

For his portrait of Sebidi, Steirn chose to position her in front of her famous 1988 painting, “Tears of Africa”, a large charcoal collage on paper. “I wanted a portrait that represented Helen Sebidi’s passion and her charisma, and I wanted to show her emerging from her art. I wanted to shoot her wrapped in her own creativity, and if you look at the photograph, you’ll notice it’s hard to work out where Helen Sebidi starts and where her artwork finishes,” he says.

The portrait, signed by Sebidi, will be auctioned at the end of the series and the proceeds donated to the charity of her choice. A copy of it will also be published in the Sunday Times newspaper on Sunday, 13 October.

A consummate fine artist, Sebidi tells filmmaker and photographer Adrian Steirn that making art in her home studio in Parktown, Johannesburg, makes her feel happy to be alive: “I know then that I’ve been born for something in life. I don’t think there’s anything better than my studio. It’s my spiritual home.”

Although the early life of Sebidi — born in 1943 in Marapyane (Skilpadfontein) — was one of poverty and daily manual labour to survive, she grew up in the protective embrace of an artistic grandmother who would serve as her life-long inspiration. “I got very close to my grandmother because all her children ran to the city and she would always say to me: ‘You are my gift,’” Sebidi says. “In the rural areas where I grew up we had strong grandparents who loved us, teaching us, with us helping them and they helped us.”

Sebidi’s grandmother, a traditional wall and floor painter, would be a major formative influence on both her personal life and career. “I was very unhappy after her death because I felt very much naked,” she says.

In her mid-teens, having completed only standard 6 (grade 8), Sebidi moved to Johannesburg. Like many of her peers, her limited means meant she could not complete her schooling and instead she sought to become a domestic worker. But she always knew she was not cut out for it and changed jobs frequently while quietly continuing to hone and broaden her skills.

This was backed by a rich informal education from her grandmother, who emphasised independence, creativity and a commitment to her community.

Eventually, Sebidi received a more formal art education under Koenakeefe Mohl, a figurative and landscape painter who had studied in West Germany. From him she learnt Western styles of illusionism, which she employed in her idealistic paintings of rural life. He would later encourage her to create the work that became her first solo art exhibit — the first black woman in South Africa to do so — and Sebidi began to be noticed in the art world.

The exhibition became a commercial breakthrough for her and enabled her to make a decent living from her art for the first time.

For the 70-year-old Sebidi, her life’s work is far from over. Her philosophy reflects the message of hard work and spiritual fulfilment that her grandmother instilled in her. “We need to meet the world, and the only thing that is in my life is energy to work. And I’m still hoping to have more energy.”

21 Icons South Africa is sponsored by Mercedes-Benz South Africa, Nikon and Deloitte and supported by The Department of Arts & Culture as a nation-building initiative.

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