William Kentridge's enigmatic charcoal drawings of a burly balding man -- sometimes naked, sometimes in a business suit, but always angst-ridden -- seem to encapsulate the weight of living in this troubled world.

The drawings are part of the laborious process by which the South African artist produces his acclaimed black-and-white animation films, the heart of the survey William Kentridge: Five Themes at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Featured in the exhibition are 75 works in a range of media, including bronze sculpture, books and splendid theater models for Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Like some of the writers he admires, Kentridge uses the absurd as a narrative device.

In Day for Night he inverts footage of ants pursuing traces of sugar and transforms the image into a bright constellation of stars in a black sky. Unruly pigeons, a dancing rhinoceros and a fictional character named Felix (one of the suited burly men and the spitting image of Kentridge) are some of the protagonists in three decades of artwork that explores colonial oppression, apartheid and other political systems.

``Kentridge is one of the great draftsmen of our times,'' says Mark Rosenthal, the Norton curator who organized the exhibition with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ``This is an artist who thinks about subjects and doesn't take them at face value.''

Kentridge, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2009, rarely uses colors other than black, white and beige, but when he does use them (with pastels or a colored pencil), he delivers a soccer punch.

Cobalt blue water rises in a room in which Felix stands as if he were waiting to drown in an ocean of his making. A tattered red flag is hoisted by a film character in a dark room in which a transcript of 1937 meetings of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party is projected on a wall as if the sessions were a movie or theater script.

The Stalinist interrogators joke and laugh as they render harsh punishment, even death sentences.

``Who is to be beaten here?'' someone sardonically asks.

The interrogators' banter is duly noted between brackets: ``[laughter].''

William Kentridge: Five Themes has traveled to Fort Worth and San Francisco and runs through Jan. 17 at the Norton. From there it goes to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, then embarks on a world tour that includes several European capitals, Australia and Abu Dhabi.

Rosenthal curated the Norton show in close collaboration with the artist, who visited the museum during its opening weekend.

Of his artistic process, which includes many hours in the studio pacing, thinking and pacing some more, the 54-year-old Johannesburg native notes: ``It [the process of creation] never starts with the meaning [of a work]. Hopefully, it ends with meaning.''

Kentridge began art classes at 8 and continued through adolescence, when he joined his mother in evening drawing lessons that featured life models. As a student at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, however, he was frustrated by painting.

``I was really bad at painting,'' he says. ``I was heavy handed with oil painting.''

Kentridge also studied mime and theater at the L'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, acted and directed in the Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company and worked in television as an art director. But he decided that he was ``a bad actor'' and embraced his talent for drawing and art direction, combining them in a career that has brought his art worldwide exposure.

Asked if he still consideres himself an actor, Kentridge thinks for a moment, then answers simply, ``No.''

Even so, he stars in most of the film fragments shown in Parcours D'Atelier: Artist in the Studio, a room that has been turned into a projection gallery in which Kentridge explores self-portraiture through dramatizations of his work. Each wall features an animated video.

In Invisible Mending, Kentridge pays tribute to the silent movies of French director Georges Mélies by using reversal techniques to deconstruct one of his famous burly male figures. In another fragment, he paces around his studio and is visited by his muse.

``The pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning round in one's head,'' the artist says in the show's accompanying catalog, which surveys the five primary themes that have characterized Kentridge's career.

In every depiction of himself and his alter egos Felix and Soho, Kentridge wears the same ensemble as he does on his Norton visit: a black suit and white shirt or a deconstructed version -- without a coat, sleeves rolled up, ready to engage paper and charcoal.

One wouldn't think one man could have so many characters within him, but even Kentridge's thickly curved nose has been turned into a subject of his animations.

His work is, simply, hypnotic.