A personal journey etched on the canvas of hardship
Internationally feted printmaker shines in local exhibition,
YOU could be forgiven for thinking that Phillemon Hlungwani is an athlete. He’s tall and well built. He’s poised. He has a strong sense of his own physicality.
You could imagine him on the starting blocks of an important race. Indeed, athletics was among this 42-year-old artist’s first passions.
“I didn’t want to be an artist in the first place,” he says.
“But I had art in my blood, and there was nothing I could do about it. It drove me.”
He remembers messing about with drawings in charcoal on the smooth surface of a rock, as a four-year-old. “Art was not something you could make a living from,” he laughs.
“In Giyani [Limpopo], where I come from, art was something you did for fun. There was no paper or expensive art equipment. When I was a child in the village, I enjoyed going with the old madalas, and with the cows and the goats . . . but boys will be boys, and I got a kick out of drawing on the walls of my parents’ house as well,” he grins.
By the time Hlungwani reached schoolgoing age, his talent was well established, but it was his high school teachers — Moses Muxe Nthombeni, Queenie Mtileni and Ben Xhagandlani — at Hanyani Thomo High School, who realised what they had here.
“I didn’t take art seriously,” he says, guilelessly. “But I passed very well in it.
“Art is art wherever you go,” Hlungwani adds. “And if you have it, it was there from before you were born.”
After matriculating, Hlungwani won a scholarship to study art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, but the transition from rural Giyani to suburban Saxonwold was enormous and really difficult.
It is these years of relentless struggle Hlungwani focuses on in his current exhibition.
“It’s about my life as a young person and how I came to the big city. It’s about acknowledging where I come from.
“I don’t hide this. When you come from such a different world, you don’t change your behaviour,” he continues.
“But you change your style of living.”
That he most certainly has. Arguably one of South Africa’s top printmakers today, Hlungwani, who is a father of four, lives on the East Rand. He has a reputation for creating beautiful linocuts and hand-coloured etchings that are in demand.
In 2000, the Johannesburg Art Foundation was nearing the end of its existence, and Hlungwani became affiliated with the Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg.
“Without the late Nhlanhla Xaba, the late Osiah Masekoameng and Kim Berman, artists who founded and nurtured the Artist Proof Studio, I would not be who I am today. They made me part of the family.”
The studio introduced Hlungwani to the craft and skill and specialisation of printmaking.
“I started out with small prints, working on the size of plate that I could afford at the time,” he says.
The largeness of his etchings in this exhibition — many of them of similar size to the intaglio hand-operated press bed on which they are printed — attest to his success. The list of galleries where he has exhibited since 2000 is long — and its geographical reach is wide, ranging from Cape Town and Joburg to Belgium and Qatar.
Hlungwani lost his father in a car accident in 1987. He was a miner in Secunda.
The loss of the breadwinner of the family during apartheid spurred a total turn-about in realities for Hlungwani’s mother and his three siblings.
The reality of being raised in an unapologetically rural context, being the son of a migrant worker and having to experience the sharp contrast and alienness of a suburban existence as a young man are never far from his sensibilities as he celebrates the inherent wisdom and character of his mother, Nwa-Sukumani Mamayila Hlungwani.
“She encouraged me. She was there to protect my work.
“It is as though God has polished a stone from a village in enabling my career to have blossomed.
“I am here in this career by the grace of God.
“My name is all over the place and my work has been bought by overseas collectors, corporates and universities.”
Hlungwani speaks about how time-consuming the creation of the works are, demonstrating how he cuts his images into the surface of the linoleum.
Trent Read, who has mentored Hlungwani, said that “in over 40 years of close contact with many, many artists I have never seen such deserved success or such extraordinary natural talent linked to techniques honed to perfection”.
“From Giyani to Alexandra: The Journey Continues”, an exhibition of etching and drawings, is at Circa gallery in Johannesburg. A mirror image of each work is at The Gallery at Grande Provence Heritage Wine Estate in Franschhoek. Both are on show until April 16
It is as though God has polished a stone from a village Art is art wherever you go. And if you have it, it was there from before you were born