Over the last decade I have written a book about my life, ready to be published. The working title is:

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 ART AND THE DEVIL – a 15-episode series, telling the story of the life of an unfashionable painter.

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The book will feature some 84 colour prints of my paintings. My work is figurative. As it turns out this is felicitous, the work literally illustrating my lived experience throughout. I see the book as mimicking a tv series in structure, each chapter a different episode dealing with different aspects of this work and life, demonstrating the consistent intersection. The chapters are not always chronological. They are self-contained, yet interlinked, weaving in and out of a linear time frame. The book is not short, but able to be digested in small freestanding episodes, with the aim to satisfy a contemporary appetite.

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A summary of pivotal themes in the book.

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1. As a history of art major under the tutelage of Dr Raymund van Niekerk, we were expected to become connoisseurs, art historians and critics; an introduction to a game for life. In the book I give a personal analysis of pivotal paintings and painters that have influenced me. After three years of history of art, I wrote a dissertation doing a master’s degree, positioning my work in the history of painting. Once you have gone there, there is no turning back, so I position my work in the context of past and present throughout the book.

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2. A description of the experience of rearing two children as a single mother, how and why I ended up in this predicament and how I managed their education within limited financial means. After eight years of post-school study, my daughter, Danielle, acquired an MBA from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and my son, Gabriel, a degree from Princeton University. A couple of chapters are devoted to the life and death of my mother, a powerful and benign force in my life. The text is accompanied throughout with reproductions of paintings in response to them all.

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3. When I bought a house in Yeoville in 1988, it was the bohemian capitol of South Africa, a place of liberal ideals and racial tolerance, with an Apartheid-legal population of 32 000 white registered residents. In 2023 some 75 000 black foreigners and locals live here, alongside a handful of whites. When border controls were relaxed after democracy was heralded in 1994, many descended on this welcoming spot with its famous open-door policy. Whites fighting for liberation were the first to run for the nearest white suburbs: north, south, east and west. The rest followed suit. Yeoville is currently a rundown, yet vibrant, overcrowded, pan-African suburb bustling with generally happy, friendly people, surviving in an informal economy amidst the confusion of an ever-weakening and dissipated general economy delivered by a well-oiled corrupt ruling party. Not all, but most in the ANC conserve energies for focusing on efficiency for concocting more deft forms of theft of tax payer’s contributions. I still live in Yeoville. I record this transformation in the book, reasons for staying and insights the experience has offered.

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4.  A crucial thread which runs through the book is an awareness of myself as a woman entering what was for centuries a male dominated platform. It all began with an intensive study trip to European galleries at the end of my third year at university, where it became blatantly clear that the entire advent: creation, execution and analysis of painting in Western art, was virtually exclusively dominated by the energies of genius men. Since my childhood, as a tomboy, I was fascinated by boys and men, their otherness, their thoughts and activities. As a woman, I emerged heterosexual, attracted to men. I discuss my personal position as a feminist throughout, describing how I have spent my life and career trying to fit into the world of men as an equal, without relinquishing my identity as a woman. My approach to feminism is not to identify with or be a social warrior on behalf of any particular branch of collegiate feminist movements. My response is individual and intuitive, more that of a bird inspecting its own feathers as an insight into the world of birds, than being an oncologist, analysing the whole from the outside in. I believe this stance, gleaning information from the inside out, comes more naturally to women, that it is equally relevant in artistic expression in any form, and should be heralded as such. I justify these perceptions throughout.

 

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The book is an intertwined sectionalised overview of all the above, written to invite those not familiar with the world of painting to explore it, for those who are visually literate, to hopefully offer interesting insights.

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I do not know how long I was dead before I was alive, or the length of time I will not breathe on the other side. I do know that I feel blessed with the life I have lived thus far: the joys and delights, the struggles and pain. Through it all the act of painting has been the ubiquitous tinted grouting that has held the colour, dark and light together, assembling the shards into a unified whole. 

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In my personal life I do not wish to be seen as anything other than fascinating for being ordinary. The same cannot apply to my work. I believe all lives are fascinating if the tale is well told, and have given the reveal my best shot. The worth of my contribution as a writer and painter, as for all artists, are for the recipients to judge.

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We all cleave to those aspects of life we learn to love. These choices are arbitrary in a world of nearly eight billion people, but acutely consequential to each of us as individuals. Ultimately, I wrote this book because I felt compelled to spin my yarn, to paint a picture in words, accompanied by images of my paintings, of my shared struggle with all other humans to find meaning in the only place and time given to me. This book is a trail of my personal adventure in response to the gift of life, one I intend to leave behind.