Artist, Thomas Trevor Motswai , award-winning South African artist is born

Thomas Trevor Motswai (known as Tommy) is an award-winning South African artist. He has achieved national and international acclaim. Motswai was born on 27 May 1963, in Soweto, South of Johannesburg. Although he was born deaf, he became a prolific and successful artist who portrayed the world around him on paper with pastels, and later lithographs. According to Motswai, he liked “to draw happy people doing ordinary things such as travelling on buses, talking and singing in places I know well, like Soweto." He attended art classes at FUBA (Federated Union of Black Artists) and the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Motswai's superb visual memory enables him to record details of people, places and events which provide us with the artist's documentary of a period from the early 1980s to the present. His colourful, bold and often naiveimages record the subtleties and humour found within a multi-cultural and economically divided South Africa. One of his best achievements was when he won the Standard Bank Young Artists Award in 1992.