Kampala — TREADING on the usually uncertain waters of art as a career is among the toughest callings in vocational life. It is even harder if you are a lady because this is a profession that has largely been associated with masculinity.

Veroniccah Muwonge, however, will lend her ear to none of those sentiments.

Her other qualities and abilities notwithstanding, she has adamantly refused to toe the common path and instead opted to go where there is none.

For that she has already made her mark.

At first impression she looks every bit your typical corporate girl with sophisticated taste and class.

But her job is far from that; she plies her trade in the business of art, painting on small and huge canvasses, a "dirty" profession that inevitably entails staining of the artist's body with colours and other not-so-clean substances in the process.

Muwonge presents an example of a new breed of female artists that have chosen to stay the course of art. The erstwhile notion that the artists' fraternity constitutes intellectual rejects and escapists has since lost currency.

If Muwonge's story is anything to go by, she has, in her budding career gone places, showcasing her paintings in Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, Nigeria, South Africa, France, Germany and the US.

She's not sure which career would afford her such luxury - on her own terms! Through the returns she has set up USTADI art studio in Ntinda, a Kampala suburb, from where she produces her paintings and fashion designs.

Born some 28-years ago in Kampala, Muwonge attended Trinity College Nabbingo, Taibah High School and Makerere University in 2002.

She has since become a full-time artist with no single auxiliary source of income.

The distinguishing factor between her and her contemporaries, she claims, is her compelling spontaneity. Her themes arise from impulse and inclination, rather than planning.

or in response to suggestions from others. She is inspired by her own body and then the immediate surroundings. Her canvasses are laden with female figures, both dressed and nude, rendered in abstract.

This is evident in her just concluded solo exhibition at Nomo gallery. The show themed "Destiny" focused on her life experience; stories about where she is coming from, where she is at now, and where she is going.

Some of the figures are posed in rather teasing poses, as though threatening to let out something sinister and yet keeping whatever it is to themselves.

Perhaps even more thrilling is her technique of application of colours and the actual texture on the surface. She has a penchant for using hot colours, the kind associated with the brave artists that are not afraid to experiment.

Such colours are said to have high temperatures and representative of danger, fire, high pulse, etc. Perhaps this speaks of her daring go-getter character latent in her.