Carrion painting
Sean O’Toole meets an artist who turns tar and fur into a tender rendering of death
AFTER the R62, a bucolic country road in the Little Karoo, slithers out of the spectacular Huisrivier Pass into Calitzdorp, this dual carriageway reforms itself and heads arrow-straight across a flat terrain to Oudtshoorn.
Seven years ago, while driving her daughter to school on this road, Marinda Combrinck, 42, stopped to look at a small bat-eared fox lying dead by the wayside.
“It was beautiful, not damaged,” says Combrinck of the bushy-tailed nocturnal predator she encountered. After a curious pause she drove off. Later, when she repeated the school run, Combrinck, who moved to Calitzdorp from Pretoria in 2001, stopped to look at the animal again. This time she photographed it.
“I felt awkward,” she admits. The discomfort passed gradually as she began to photograph more dead animals — and in the process began to detect a subject for her art.
Combrinck’s studio is located in a front room of her home, opposite Calitzdorp’s famous sandstone Dutch Reformed Church.
When I meet her she shows me a red box. It is filled with hundreds of snapshots of roadkill. Taken in vivid colour, the photos depict dead tortoises, scrub hares, tree squirrels, chameleons, genets, honey badgers, dassies, polecats, puff adders and numerous birds, including a spotted eagle-owl.
It is as if Noah’s ark had run aground off the nearby Swartberg range.
The grisly photos are source material for her tonally muted and often tender ink, charcoal and watercolour portraits of roadkill. These portraits, 25 examples of which were recently on display at Knysna Fine Art, return a measure of dignity to her subjects.
Achieving this didn’t come easily to the artist. Initially she struggled with the visceral encounters with stinking or scavenged roadkill on the R62. She nonetheless speaks affectionately of the dead tortoise she found “overturned like a caravan”.
Her mystification at finding an aardvark is palpable. “I had never seen anything like it — at first I thought its ears were horns.”
She was also hampered by her own artistic inability. A dab hand at painting humans, notably grizzled Calitzdorp regulars and scantily clad belles of the sort that once featured on airplane fuselages, she had never depicted animals before.
“It was very difficult at first,” says Combrinck. “All I saw was tar and fur.”
In 2011 she decided to take a taxidermy course in Barberton. The experience of touching and composing dead animals in such a “tactile” way gave her a keener sense of them as living things.
This didn’t prevent the “funny” looks she got at her exhibition opening in Knysna. Combrinck’s project invites caricature. Chil- dren in the village where she lives, aware of her macabre subject, sometimes bring her dead lizards and spiders. She dismisses gothic interpretations of what she does.
“If we lived in Mexico, where they celebrate the dead, we would see and think about this differently,” she says. “What I’m trying to do is offer contact with an animal form at a transition point.”
She is not alone in this ambition. Jo Ractliffe and Brent Meistre have both photographed roadkill, while Leigh Voigt and Colin Richards have used paint and ink to describe the silence of dead birds. She nods her head appreciatively when I mention Albrecht Dürer, a German draughtsman whose 1502 watercolour of a young hare remains strangely thrilling.
Pointing to art history however makes Combrinck’s concerns seem outdated. If anything, her portraits are keyed into current science. For some time now the Endangered Wildlife Trust has supervised a roadkill research and mitigation project. A recent milestone is the launch of Road Watch, a smartphone app that allows road users to log roadkill. It is one way to track how many grass owls are dying on the N17 between Springs and Secunda, a wellknown hotspot.
Given how many hours she has clocked up driving the R62, I ask Combrinck an obvious question. Yes, she replies. “Unfortunately, I have hit some birds and once a tortoise. It was a terrible experience.”
Hers is not an art created from a moral high ground. If anything, her portraits are gifts of affection and rites of atonement.
LS