Capturing the Human essence: An Interview with Jason Langa
Jason Langa’s work exists between the real and the dream-like. “When you’re thinking of something, you remember something, you can have an image in your head but it will never be crystal clear.” states the artist.
Jason Langa (b. 1997) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist who has completed formal art education through the printmaking programme at Artist Proof Studio and is our fourth Artist Of The Moment. His practice is primarily through the mediums of printmaking and oil painting, with portraiture as his main artistic genre. He is best known for depicting the people in his work in a signature ultramarine blue, nudging viewers to pay attention to the emotive essence of his subjects over who they are. I had the pleasure of meeting Jason for this interview at Gallery 21, located inside the Transwerke building by the Constitutional Hill precinct. Langa was a part of a group exhibition titled Dreamscapes, taking place in the gallery space at the time. We deeply thank the Visual Republik team for allowing us to use their venue to stage this interview.
Like for many, artmaking originally started as a hobby for young Jason Langa, until Grade 10 when he took Visual Arts as a subject. “And my teacher at the time, she recounted one of her stories where she [had] made a lot of money selling [an art] piece. And then I was like ‘Oh, this thing can? I can actually make money off of this thing.’ And obviously it became a bit of an existential crisis where it’s like, because growing up, up until that point, I always thought I would have to leave the arts and go and pursue something stable. But I think once I heard that story, I resonated so much with it that I wanted to be like, No, I can. I want to do this.” recalls Langa.
Jason went on to enrol in the Bachelor of Fine Arts programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, leaving the school after one year. His main gripe with the course was how theory-focused it was. For him, the toll of trying to keep up with the theoretical component of the course extinguished his passion for the arts. He explains, “I think I felt the pressure, because in highschool I was somewhat of a top performer. Then WITS just showed me that, yeah, you don’t know anything. So I think I started to lose my passion for art. My work was suffering a lot because I had to focus a lot on the books, you know. And I didn’t, I really didn’t enjoy that. Because I think my work leans more towards the technical side.
I need to paint. I need to print. I need to do something practically every day. But with WITS, I’d have to spend weeks on end focusing on assignments, focusing on studying for tests and that was not me.” After leaving WITS University, Jason tried his hand at an animation course through Boston Media House. “I did animation for a year and a half as well. I think I wanted that [animation] to be an entry point into arts.” he states.
After his second unsuccessful attempt at formal art education, in 2019, Jason decided to leave Johannesburg entirely. “I went to the Northern Cape. I was doing a retail job. I was staying by myself, you know, as I had to put myself in a very uncomfortable situation and really think about this decision to become an artist.” he expresses. As he did not know anyone in the town during his five-month stay in Kuruman, Jason would go to his retail job and immediately after his shift, go home and draw.
As a born and bred Jo’burg-er, Langa felt that he needed to escape the fast-paced nature of the city. He expands, “I needed somewhere super slow to change my perspective on things, because I had that pressure of [feeling like] I’m on a timeline. You know, Joburg is so fast. People are achieving things every single day. And if you get caught up [in] that pressure, you’ll feel inadequate. So I had to take it upon myself to go somewhere [else].” The slowness of Kuruman gave him a new perspective. He didn’t need to chase overnight success. “I’m not gonna retire. I’m doing this for life. So is there really a need for me to blow up at 25? What about the next 50 years? So I just decided, well, let me just take my time with it. Let my career progress as naturally [and] as organically as possible.”
After he had returned to Johannesburg, Jason was encouraged by one of his friends, who was studying at Artist Proof Studios at the time, to apply for their 3-year printmaking programme. He filled out the application form, went through the interview process and started in 2020. He graduated in 2022, took a gap year to improve his practice as a painter and returned to Artist Proof Studios in 2024 to do his postgraduate qualification. Jason fondly recalls his experience at Artist Proof Studios, “APS (Artist Proof Studios) has been super beneficial. It has been super helpful, like the fact that they’re more practical-based, I enjoyed that. So I wish I [had] found APS from highschool as I wouldn’t have gone to WITS because they were giving me exactly what I want[ed]. Yes, they’ll teach us how to write a statement. You know, biography, all the written elements of art, but they [Artist Proof Studio] were more focused on the technique, which I absolutely loved. So I ended up enjoying printmaking, and yeah, now it’s part of my practice.”
Experimentation is a key component of Jason’s practice, allowing him to play with different mediums, colours and styles. Earlier iterations of his iconic blue portraits were ones with red, purple and even green as the focal colour. Jason traces his journey to blue, “So I think for me, having a very graphite background. I was only a pencil drawer for the longest time. I focus[ed] so much on pencil and obviously, I had that background of, like monochromatic tones. I understood them very well. So when I tried painting, it was just an intuitive thing that I didn’t want to paint skin tone because I felt like I just wouldn’t do justice [to] the kind of experimentation I wanted to do.” Jason, at the time, was still making Black & White works and was looking to play around with colour. He decided to throw himself into the deep end, purchased his first ultramarine blue oil paint and a new canvas and tried the blue pigment. “It worked so well. I enjoyed it so much. It ended up growing from there. And it’s like, oh, let me try red instead. Let me try green instead. Let me try all these colours and see how I interact with them, you know? And yeah, I had so much fun with those early works, like I was just experimenting, exploring, especially being a first-time painter and getting into oil paint, which is, you know, deemed as, like, the most difficult one, you know, but I enjoyed it.” recounts Langa. He went on to play around with red and green as a focal colour, continuing his
tradition of experimentation in his practice. He wanted to challenge himself to do an entire conceptually thematic body of work. “So I started to engage with my themes, engage with my medium. You know, what do I want to do? How do I want to approach it? So, trial and error, I did more green paintings, I did more blue paintings, experimentation,
and then got to a point where blue resonated so much because it became the closest thing that I could liken human essence with, you know?
So when I draw my figures in blue, it’s less about who I’m drawing and more about the essence I’m trying to bring out because we all going to look at this blue painting, and we’re going to experience it differently, but at the same time, it’s going to bring up [a] universal shared connection, shared emotion that we feel as human beings.”
Once Jason anchored the concept of shared human connection and emotion within his work, he began to focus on the context in which the people in his work were placed. He started to play around with different backgrounds, placing his figures in different buildings and landscapes, coming to sunsets as the main background of recent works. “For me, like the sunset is such a unique point of nostalgia. We all experience sunsets and enjoy [them] in our own ways. But [a] sunset will remain a sunset, [in the] same way that emotion remains that emotion.’’
The artist’s impressionist style allows him to be more expressive and liberal with the accuracy of things in his work, granting him the opportunity for work to, as he says, “Play between the dream state and the real life state. So this in between is where my work exists.”
PAYDAY PRINT: ‘The Hope That Stayed beside Me’, Edition on Paper, 46,8cm x 40cm, Available on The Dealr
Our Payday Print of the Moment is a screenprint by our Artist of the Moment, Jason Langa, titled ‘The Hope That Stayed beside Me’. The person depicted in this work is one of Jason’s friends named Hope, hence the title. He explains, “My work lately has been more focused on feelings of positivity or the feeling of looking forward to something, hope. You know, all of these feelings that we have deep inside of us, but we’re too scared to let out, because, you know, there’s that whole thing of saying that, like, if I feel too happy, something bad’s gonna happen. And that’s not always the case, and that’s never the case.”
