Time to get crafty about art, style and business

WHEN you’re a creative person, the whole world is made of art materials. You don’t have to go shopping for oil paints and canvases or blocks of Italian marble to create a masterpiece. The early cave dwellers who inhabited our country didn’t have tubes of acrylic paint availed from the community art supply shop, but they managed to create beautiful cave murals using the materials they found around them.

You only have to take a drive through the Peninsula to discover the creative genius of our people is alive and well.

Driving through Newlands the other day, I was intrigued to see a large poodle sitting on the pavement watching the passing traffic. It was made of rusty chicken wire, but looked so realistic I slowed down in case it ran in front of my car. There’s a brilliant wire sculptor in Kalk Bay who turns out an endless stream of amusing and original works.

I once saw an artist enjoying the Fish Hoek beach sunshine and using a magnifying glass to burn seascape pictures on to bits of driftwood. He had a small gallery of his work propped up in the sand alongside him and seemed to be attracting customers.

An old man I met some years ago collects discarded beverage cans from the city’s rubbish dumps and cuts them into flower shapes using a pair of rusty scissors, then paints them to produce very pretty bunches of metal flowers that are not affected by the Cape’s water shortage. Another retired fellow I knew collected old wine corks and used them to build dolls’ houses for his grandchildren’s friends. One of my younger friends recently used colourful plastic drinking straws and a two-litre cooldrink bottle to create a very attractive and trendy lamp-shade.

Then, of course, there’s old newspaper. Building up layers of paper, stuck together with home-made flour glue is an age-old craft that has been used for making everything from papier mâché party masks to valuable furniture. There’s even a house near Muizenberg that’s built of papier mâché and has survived all the Cape’s seasons for decades.

There’s always a lot of talk of improving schools and institutions of tertiary education, but I believe there’s a real need for craft schools where people can be shown how to make useful and saleable items from the materials we normally toss into the bin.

I believe many people are becoming bored with the mass-produced tat we surround ourselves with and are ready for things that are original and unique. It’s time we took more notice of the talents of our local crafts people.

Last Laugh

Fred’s short-term memory was getting very bad as he grew older, so one of his friends suggested he use the age-old remedy and tie a string round his finger to remind him of something.

One night as he was climbing into bed, he noticed a string round his finger, but couldn’t remember why he had put it there.

Worried that he’d forgotten something vital, he tossed and turned for hours. Finally, at 3am, he suddenly remembered. He had an early meeting the following day, so he’d tied the string on his finger to remind him to go to bed early.