South African Portrait Awards 2023, Top 40

“Portrait of Fatima February at The Iziko National Gallery”

OIl on Linen, 50 x 60, 2023

This painting was completed from life over five sessions at the Iziko National Gallery. Fatima February is a national treasure: a bottomless repository of cultural knowledge, having served Iziko institutions for over 45 years.

An accomplished artist herself, her work - which often references her upbringing in District Six - forms part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. We chose to seat her in front of the Ha Barona, a large recreation of ancient cave paintings in Lesotho. For me, these ancient paintings represent the beginning of art history and prove how integral drawing and painting is to humanity.

Since Ha Barona is a recreation, it is in essence a master copy, referencing the work that I did during my year long residency at the Iziko National Gallery. The painting is now on show at Rust-En-Vrede gallery as part of the “Top 40” exhibition of the South African Portrait Awards, and I believe it is one of the only ones done from life.

Residency at the IZIKO National Gallery

For the past several months, I’ve been working at the IZIKO National Gallery, as artist in residence for their 150 year exhibition (open until November 2023). I started just by simply doing copies of artwork on display that I felt I could learn from, but then got interested in how the public interacted with paintings. Everyone is drawn to different works, interpretations and taste vary wildly depending on the viewers life’s experiences. So I set out painting portraits of people looking at work that meant something to them.

You can read more about it on the IZIKO website. Thank you Andrew Lamprecht for the write up: https://www.iziko.org.za/news/art-encompasses-the-entire-human-experience/

"The Light and Weight of Home"

"You know, until you artists got here, I never used to see the Sky

John F. Carlson recounts being told by a rural worker in The US. For me, it was as if I had never really seen the beautiful lands of my birthplace in South Africa, until I returned as a painter.

“Curiously enough enough, we think we truly appreciate long before we do. We find later we did not see the things truly, because we had not yet arrived the station that made true appreciation and consequent ‘vision’ possible.”

This is how i felt when seeing Cape Town in my thirties, which is why I have turned to plein air landscape painting as a way of getting to know South Africa better.

"Reality is always a disappointment. Have you ever revisited in mature years the places of your childhood? In your memory, these places and things are wrapped in a kind of golden haze. The very trees are not real trees, but glorified impersonations of trees. A cottage is a mansion, and the meadows are eternally sparkling. Better not revisit them, but let them remain in your memory with that teasing uncertainty." (Carlson, 1958, 120).

Perhaps the magic lies between the haze of memory and the wonder of the present. Just like a good portrait evokes the presence or memory of a person, a successful landscape painting draws upon the sublime and intangible memory of a place, yet anchors it to its time. One artist can never be more contemporary than another.

The difficulty with landscape painting is that it requires a lifetime of study and constant practice to execute well. This exhibition represents the first time I have been able to confidently achieve what I set out to do, and I would not have been able to do this without my training in Florence (thank you Tanvi).

I hope I was able to capture some of the inexplicable wonder of Cape Town, and I hope you will be able to visit the show in person so that I can share it with you.

See details below.