Though she had no formal training (she studied cinematography briefly at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco), painting felt natural. Growing up, Namoda said, she’d painted on and off, falling in love with pigments and paint. A suite of early paintings—naïve watercolors inspired by her “unrequited love” for the Island of Mozambique, a UNESCO-protected city renowned for its colonial Portuguese architecture—would lead to her first exhibition, and establish some of the themes and motifs that would become central to her practice: family, culture, mundanity, and color. The work itself, though, has evolved dramatically: Works on paper have been replaced by oil and acrylic on large-scale canvases; the palette is more vibrant; the brushwork more refined.
Africa has maintained a particular hold on Namoda’s spirit and imagination—not only its cities, but its villages, too. “There’s a cadence in rural Africa in which I’m able to see God, if I’m going to be absolutely spiritual about the whole thing—because for me, painting is spiritual,” she said, recalling the quiet, fragrant tea plantations of Gurúè, the village in northern Mozambique where her grandfather was born. “Even the nicest of resorts or the fanciest hotels in Tuscany can’t replace that feeling. I appreciate beauty in every sense possible, but I think there has to be an earthen quality in order for me to really be completely moved, and the earthen quality can’t be bourgeois for me.”