Open studio; Spring 2024 in our home, Tamboerskloof. Cape Town.
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” – Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
Having so many of my paintings, drawings and prints in one place, layered against the walls, on tables and in boxes showed me a journey over five decades of image making. My work.
Although I bring books and sometimes sound into the studio I am usually alone with my thoughts and visual stimuli. This is my “subject matter”, what I see before me and in reflection, the colour I find plus the way I make the image. I noted from this open studio over view that I have not pursued content but I see what has ensued.
In the garden someone asked, is the garden an art form? The garden borders the north side of our property. It is a still place that birds visit and offers a calmness although we overlook the center of the city and the ever changing mountain is our constant visual and climatic companion.
The question of the garden was put to Olivier Laing. She answered in her essay Paradise (March 2018), “if it is, it’s the kind of art I like, bedded in the material, nearly domestic, subject to happenstance and weather.”
“the gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity”. So too is the activity of painting and the painter.
Opening my drawers and paging through decades of images that have layered the inside of my student days, family, marriage, mothering, teaching, projects, friendships and decades of memories of milling around the mulch of the visual art industry, comes with a deep sense of joy. I see that I am a lucky person.
Some images I found were made at school; fifty years ago approximately.
There is a reservoir of colour within. Transforming into image from these resources is a task; seeking images that communicate viscerally or intuitively is what I do in time, especially when the clock is not ticking me into chores. And I ruminate about images when I am walking, driving, cooking….
During the open studio visit there was quiet viewing and time for conversation about the work and about the industry, the art world and art making.
An image seems to hovers then slip into memory. To nurture this slip, garden it well as there may be new life in an unexpected place. (This is to say that the seeing, the nature of seeing as in gardening is ongoing and available to us; least we chose to look away).
Four days passed with friends, family, artists and many others interested in visiting. The conversations were rewarding. By hearing myself and others I saw threads through colour and mark that gave me confidence; there is one voice over these decades of work, the hands and eyes of one person busy in seeking out what to say and how an images wants to be said. There is such freedom in this platform of being.
Packing away and following up on notes, following up on people interested in teaching sessions, gave me another overview. I revisited the weekend as I have revisited and catalogued all the work from my shelves and drawers; like a double take and this is profoundly restorative. The task of opening my drawers has been like cutting a bunch of flowers for my house, from my garden. The scents and vibrancies, varieties and diversities will carry me forward into more years of making and sharing.
Many years ago my journey as a painter came into focus at the Johannesburg art Foundation. During the 1970’s I worked with Bill Ainslie and many others. We drew from life, we painted objects. We made sense of the world by focusing on making. Abstraction for me is a way of seeing. I see in nonfigurative structures; I don’t look for a figure or narrative. I have nothing to say actually. I cannot teach this but I can collaborate in looking and making.
I am including these notes from an essay by Pat Williams written for the catalogue about Bill Ainslie.
“Bill Ainslie was often bitterly opposed by painters and critics who felt that in the South African context [of the struggle against apartheid] abstraction was ‘opting out’. The attacks never deflected him, because he did not seek to impose his way of painting on others, and because in any case he thought the reverse: that particularly in the South African context, where thought and perception were everywhere channeled and censored, by friends as well as enemies, where there were so many ‘secret guardians’ of the visible as well as what was unconscious, abstraction was ‘the most defiant, most revolutionary way one could possibly paint’. He wrote: ‘We don’t make art in an attempt to change people, we make it to change ourselves, and if it works it will change others by the appeal it makes.’”
Pat William
And then the workshops, the Thupelo workshops particularly plus the triangle workshops that I have participated in. More threads, more wonderful ways of seeing and people to add to the tapestry of five decades, exposed by opening the drawers.
Collaborations work differently from time alone in the studio at home.
I really enjoy working with master print makers, framers, stretcher makers and suppliers of materials. Steel workers, weavers and institutions. In some cases this becomes political or intellectual. Distractions from actually being in the presence of doing are forceful.
In the project that I work in now , the Orange Art Project, I encourage the artists/teachers to allow play, learning, chattering or time out. We are easily comfortable with ourselves when using our hands but we forget, we have forgotten to hold this focus.
Opening the drawers has reminded me and my hope is that you are reminded too.
