Finding the time and place -- for everything
A new documentary on the artist Tyrone Appollis premieres this week alongside an exhibition at the Sanlam Gallery in Bellville, shedding light on a colourful artist, writes Mary Corrigall
‘HOW’S that fish for you now, nice hey?” asks Tyrone Appollis, after adding a daub of colour to a fish-shaped kite depicted floating in a painting. Classical music is blaring from a corner of the Sanlam Art Gallery where he has established a makeshift studio in the run-up to the opening of his exhibition, Of My Time, which will feature the premiere of a documentary film on him produced by Ron Moller.
A number of paintings in different stages of completion surround Appollis. Like a skilled boxer he bobs and weaves around paintings, jabbing his brush in the air, adding flourishes of colour.
He says his process of painting is one involving “obliteration and recovery”.
He will work on the new paintings for the exhibition, which includes older works, until the very last minute; either “destroying” and imploding elements or accentuating and bringing out features — all under the watchful gaze of long-time fan, patron and critic Stefan Hundt, the director of the gallery.
Watching Appollis taking quick swipes at his paintings with a brush is nerve-racking — even if he can “obliterate” any errors.
He is clearly a talented and experienced painter and has doggedly pursued art since he was a child, staging his first exhibition at 14.
That this early talent wasn’t nurtured in the way it might have been had he lived in an equal society is reflected in his life story and art practice giving resonance to the title of the exhibition and new film. He is undoubtedly an artist of “his time”.
The only quality formal instruction he enjoyed was from the late South African art legend Cecil Skotnes, during a part-time community art initiative in the early ’80s. Like Skotnes, he is inspired by the early modernists, peppering his conversation with references to famous 20th-century painters including Picasso, Paul Klee and Van Gogh.
He’s a painter in the old-fashioned sense, vacillating between a desire to belong and to rebel against the status quo.
He processes his perceived “rejection” by the local art world through his interpretation of the Van Gogh narrative.
“If Vincent didn’t protect his own work we wouldn’t have work of such a high standard,” he says.
Like Van Gogh, he generates vibrantly coloured works, though he would prefer that you don’t refer to them as “vibrant”.
“People will think I only know about colour.”
The expressiveness of his renderings is not quite in the vein of Van Gogh but he is concern is depicting life — in Mitchells Plain and other Cape Town townships settings — an Athlone market, taxi ranks, blocks of flats in Ocean View (dedicated to the late poet, writer and artist Peter Clarke), shacks and dilapidated houses.
His subject matter has likely also kept him on the periphery of the art scene.
Though township scenes found favour with the tourist market, prompting artists and curio shops to mass-produce them, his paintings are not shaped by the cliché. His interest lies in using these scenes to draw attention to the deepening inequality in the country.
But although his art is political, it is not obviously so.
He is not an in-your-face Ayanda Mabulu or Brett Murray — even when, in one work, he makes obvious reference to the Guptas and their excessive wealth.
Despite his interest in the plight of ordinary people, he might be accused of aestheticising poverty, but his paintings are pleasing to look at and do not articulate the bleakness that pervades his poetry.
“I can’t be bogged down with intellectualism, I must do what I want to do,” says Appollis.
Whatever the politics or merits of his aesthetic, he has inspired a generation of artists.
Willie Bester, whose art is quite obviously related to that of Appollis, has probably enjoyed more attention from the art industry than Appollis, who has never been signed to a commercial gallery. Appollis is bitter about being excluded from the recent Cape Town Art Fair but concedes he might not be cut out for the commercial scene.
“I am unmanageable and would not want to make paintings on order.”
At 60, he still has the spirit and deportment of a young man. He moves, talks and thinks fast. It is hard to keep up; his mind appears to be constantly ticking and his paintings — so full of activity, colour and energy — reflect what it is like to be in his company.
He keeps throwing out great sound-bites.
“After my first few visits to Tyrone, it became clear that he had a set repertoire of lines and actions that he repeats,” says Moller, who set the documentary in Appollis’s home to keep the perspective intimate.
“The film is just two people discussing life over a cup of coffee,” says Moller.
In some ways, however, Appollis isn’t a man of his time.
He epitomises a Renaissance figure; not only does he paint to music but considers himself a musician — often insisting on playing the penny whistle or other instruments at his openings.
In fact, he claims to be more interested in music than painting and says he sells his art so that he can make music and write. He appears gifted in all three and is a stimulating conversationalist.
One can’t help wondering who he might have become and what heights he might have reached had he had access to higher education in his youth. Not that he has done a bad job teaching himself.
As he has aged he has made peace with his lot — and the disappointment that fame has, so far, eluded him.
“I want to be a very good wrong artist,” he says, suggesting this might be an apposite title for the next film made about him.
The exhibition, In My Time: Tyrone Appollis, opens at the Sanlam Art Gallery, Bellville, on Tuesday at 7pm
I am unmanageable and wouldn’t want to make paintings on order . . . I want to be a very good wrong artist