Cassi Namoda spoke with the Cut about her artistic journey, her inspirations, and why the light in East Hampton, where she’s based, is unlike that of anywhere else
Cassi Namoda. Photo: Alina Asmus “Some would say your late 20s are a little bit late these days to start a career as a painter, which is weird and unfortunate,” says Mozambique-born artist Cassi Namoda, 33. After studying cinematography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and working for fashion designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh sourcing artisanal pieces from abroad for the store to sell — Namoda turned to painting from a very personal place.
When I was 25, I moved to L.A., and the geographic position of Los Angeles, for me, felt very alienating. So painting became this form in which I decided to start negotiating my homesickness. I was surprised because I have a natural tendency to be a writer. Painting had been something I had always done growing up, but school interrupted that path for me so I found other forms of expression.
I call Mozambique home, though it’s not home. It’s my ancestral interior. My mother’s there, my family’s there, my grandparents are in the earth there. Growing up, we moved around quite often. My father had different notions about living and experience and that one must see the world. That also benefits my practice. If I look at Emil Nolde’s work, or even Gauguin or van Gogh, these painters would travel, and they would exist in these places.
I need my brain to work in different ways. Everything informs something else. Now I’m taking ballet, so that is informing something about my practice, about me as a person. It makes your feet so strong that now I can’t paint with shoes on. My feet are like, No, I’ve got this. I have the ground. Once I get back into the studio, refreshed, having learned something new, my mind works in a different way.I carved out a pretty nice situation for myself there.
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