An eye for the positive
Joburg in watercolours
Johannesburg is often falsely accused of ugliness. This might be because nobody in their right mind has ever come to Joburg for the nature. But perhaps the city’s physical beauty takes a little while to filter into one’s consciousness; a typical Capetonian visitor, say, tends to recoil at Joburg’s forbidding high walls, or the crass modernity of most of its buildings, or the parched yellowness of the vegetation in winter.
You have to spend at least a year in the metropolis to really twig to its sensory seductions: the crystalline intensity of the light, the sprawling canopy of the suburban forest, the ranks of ancient ridges, the jacaranda revolution of late spring, the intoxicating petrichor scent after a storm.
Plenty of great artists have traced
Joburg’s hard edge — think Gerard Sekoto’s Soweto paintings, or William Kentridge’s mines and their dumps. But watercolour painter and sculptor Alastair Findlay is one of the few Joburg artists who look attentively at the softer, greener world of the central and northern suburbs.
Findlay is also one of the legends of South African political cartooning — he started with the Vrye Weekblad in 1989, a couple of years after Zapiro’s debut. But as of this spring, he is no longer in the game, after the Sunday Sun called a halt to his superbly painted commentaries.
It was a wrench, as the tabloid had been publishing Findlay’s work for the better part of two decades. The local newspaper industry is under brutal financial pressure, but many of its proprietors seem strangely oblivious to the fact that good cartoons hold more appeal for readers than almost anything else they see in print.
Findlay’s satirical eye continues to operate in his Joburg landscapes, which manage to gently mock the madness of the city while celebrating its physical spectacles — and his coming exhibition is a meditation on traffic as well as on trees.
Findlay created many of the paintings while sitting high up on freeway embankments for three hours at a stretch — at Gillooly’s, at Melrose Arch, on the
Western Bypass — watching the all-day
“rush hour” barrelling past him.
The cars he paints are all white and cutely Noddyish. “My friend Marian Hester once asked me, ‘Why are they all
Daihatsus?’ And I said, ‘They’re paying me: it’s subliminal advertising!’
“For me, cars are all the same,” he explains. “They all have four wheels and are burning fossil fuels with internal combustion engines. So I suppose that’s why I make them generic, because I’m talking about the car as a phenomenon. If you look at the M1, for instance, the cars form a constant stream: the M1 is the major waterway that Joburg doesn’t have. And our automobile culture looks very strange when you put yourself outside of it. It horrifies me in a way. So there is an element of critique that emerges. The image might look a bit like a toy town, a bit celebratory, but there’s something ominous going on underneath that.”
But many of the other pieces are about unalloyed pleasures: ochre boulders etched against the spring sky, cascades of bougainvillea, vertiginous winding passes. Look out for the colonnade of jacarandas framing the War Memorial in Saxonwold, or a close-up of a giddy double bend on Munro Drive, or a view of the water tower making like Mufasa at the top of Northcliff ridge.
Findlay is wry and self-effacing, and he looks like someone who just walked off a 19th-century whaling ship. Born and raised in Pretoria, he studied art at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis school of art, graduating in 1982 with a major in painting. “But I was using oils, and I think that’s probably why I did so badly,” he says. “One is either an oil person or a water person. I think I was grappling with the wrong medium. I used to think that watercolour painting is the poorer sister of oil painting. It felt less serious — light and flimsy, a watermark. The sense of value seemed different to an oil painting surface, which carried gravitas and weight.”
Despite the mischievous tone of the traffic scenes, his work is full of the gravitas of observation. “I go and sit down in the scene and paint what I see. It’s not like I’m cooking things up.”
That said, too slavish an accuracy can bring a lifeless echo of the real thing, so Findlay subtly exaggerates perspectives, using his cartooning skills to make a scene lurch forward into the viewer’s space. He is a fan of the disorienting urban landscapes of Wayne Thiebaud, the US painter more famous for his still lifes of cakes and ice creams. And his studio bookshelf at Delta Park is teeming with old masters.
Findlay is also a very accomplished sculptor: the exhibition will include an arresting series of ceramic statuettes of waste collectors dragging massive loads — an unsettling counterpoint to the airy whimsicality of the watercolours.
That each painting is completed on site makes Findlay’s process unusual — countless good landscape painters work from photographs in their studios. “I sit a while and contemplate the scene, and then slowly map it in pencil and then there’s a bit of grinding away at it before you start to feel the magic happen. A transition point. Then you just feel like a conduit for something. You are sort of liaising with chance and chaos; it’s a balancing act.”
His equipment is minimal. “I sit flat on the ground on a cushion, cross-legged, which gives you a different perspective — looking up at the scene. No easel. All my paints are on the ground, so there’s no need for a table.”
Pedestrians stop and watch him work, but they don’t break his flow. “I’ve had a lot of nice chats with people. My worst experience was sitting on an embankment and suddenly getting drenched — I didn’t realise I was sitting on top of an irrigation system.”
Every day throughout October, Findlay has been participating in the international Inktober drawing project by documenting a month in the life of the jacaranda tree; the blooming and falling of the Brazilian alien’s famous violet flowers. It’s an audiovisual spectacle, he says. “Yesterday I was painting jacarandas and realised I could hear every single petal dropping onto the ground.
Tap, tap, tap. Like a light rain. It was magical. I almost couldn’t believe it.”
Painter Alastair Findlay is giving the traffic (and trees) of Joburg some much-needed attention, writes Carlos Amato
Findlay’s exhibition, Here & Now, opens at 6pm on November 14 at the Hermitage at the REEA Foundation in Marlborough Avenue, Craighall Park, Johannesburg. The work will be on display until November 28