Unleash your creativity…
Renowned cartoonist wants to help you to ‘see better’, writes Kevin Ritchie
You just need a pencil and paper and you’ll be drawing as you read it.
IT’S A BOOK that’s been years in the making and managed to stymie two official book launches in the process. The first time around, the book launch scheduled for last January had to be cancelled because its author, cartoonist Dov Fedler, was literally fighting for his life in ICU. His kidneys had shut down, and he was on dialysis.
“It was touch and go,” he says laconically.
The second attempt was booked for March 26 this year – only for President Cyril Ramaphosa to institute the 21 day lockdown starting that Friday. The hard lockdown would eventually stretch to three times that length before the restrictions were relaxed to the much softer level 3 on Monday June 1.
Launch or no launch, If you can write you can draw has finally been published and it is now on sale.
The book is the fruit of Fedler’s lifelong passion for art, which has seen him master various disciplines from sculpting to painting in oils as well as becoming his day job: 50 years as the much-loved political cartoonist, chiefly for The Star and Saturday Star, but ultimately all the newspapers in the Independent Media stable.
If you can write you can draw is the philosophy that has driven him ever since he was a young boy in his father’s print shop, defying his dad’s wish that he become a dentist, dropping out of Wits university after trying architecture and instead pursuing a more bohemian life, first in advertising and then in political cartooning.
The book is a series of easy-to-follow lessons all premised on the letters of the alphabet and numbers, in the hope readers will be encouraged to draw and, in doing so, see better, be more imaginative and unleash their creativity every day.
“If you think you have no drawing ability you are wrong. We all draw before we learn to write. If you can write you’re already drawing,” says the feisty 80-year old who only finally retired from The Star in 2017, “you just don’t know it. My aim is to teach you what you already know.”
The book began life several years ago as a text book for South African primary school teachers to help them teach literacy, but it took Fedler’s second daughter, the acclaimed international author Joanne, to see the book’s wider appeal.
“She made me look like a genius,” grins her father, “she said this will be a book for everyone. So, she took it and did just that, publishing it through her publishing company, Joanne Fedler Media.”
Fedler would still love to see the book in every school, but he’s happy too that it can be used just as effectively by adults to while away the time under lockdown.
“It’s perfect for that,” he says, “you just need a pencil and some paper and you’ll be drawing as you read it.”
Fedler hasn’t been sitting back during the lockdown, he’s finished the second volume of his memoirs; Starlight Memories, a book he says he’s proudest of. It focuses on the time he spent making films in the 1970s for the African market. It’s due for publication next month.
“In many ways it’s a homage to Woody Allen. It’s named after a cinema that was in the old Bank of Lisbon building over the road from The Star.
We actually worked on the film and had great ambitions for it,” he laughs, “but the premiere was held on a Monday morning. I never became a movie mogul.”
But that’s not all, he’s also putting the finishing touches to a graphic novel that began life as the only short story he has ever written, penned during a visit to Israel in 1986. Titled Gagman, it’s the story of a Jewish man who manages to dodge the gas chambers by telling the camp commandant jokes until one day he forces the Nazi to laugh himself to death, before escaping in the dying days of World War II to get to America to find Superman and discover the meaning of life.
For Fedler that meaning of life has been art, specifically drawing: “Humans need to draw as much as they need to write – to express themselves and make sense of their lives,” he says.
“If I can do it, you can too. This magical ritual of creation and self-expression is free to anyone who desires it. I wrote this book to show you that drawing is not a secret gift bestowed on the talented few. It can be yours too, if you want it.”
You can get your copy of ‘If
You Can Write, You Can Draw’ from Love Books in Melville or redpepperonline here https:// www.redpepperonline.co.za/ if-you-can-write-you-can-drawby-dov-fedler-joanne-fedlermedia-9780648283898 – copies can be dispatched and delivered anywhere in South Africa.