Image: ‘Self’

You’re a self-taught artist. You didn’t go to any schools. Did this help build your aesthetic?

I dropped out of Michaelis art school after six weeks. I just didn’t enjoy it. I was too young and too insecure and scared. I was eighteen and a bundle of insecurity. I didn’t fit in, it wasn’t me. I was at SACS up until standard eight and

I almost got kicked out of art class because they found out I was colour-blind

and I found out at the same time. Then I went to Rosebank House College and was allowed to experiment and it was fantastic.
 

So you found out in high school you were colour-blind? How did it happen?

Yeah, in standard eight. I was in class doing a sculpture and I was doing it dark green, and my teacher said why are you doing it in dark green? She said it’s maroon and I said well no, and that’s how I figured it out. So, for me brown and red and green kind of blur, as does grey and green as we found out, so yeah (laughs).
 

Do you think being self-taught is better than being school-taught?

I think it has its advantages and disadvantages. I think people who are taught at school are able to work much more efficiently. I’m not basing that on any knowledge, it’s just from what I’ve seen, but they seem to have techniques that they can fall back on when things get tough. Whereas for me, my fear takes over. I know I can do it and I know I’m capable of doing it. I just kind of get nervous.

A big thing with my art is I’m always looking for affirmation that what I do is actually good

I know technically it’s quite good, but it’s recognition from people in the art world. When your friends and family say it, it’s great. But it doesn’t really make a difference until someone in the industry says, ‘you know what, you’ve got great talent’. It keeps you going.
 

Image: ‘Stillness’

Who was the first person you ever did a portrait of?

I did a portrait of a girl I was in love with at school. It was the first time I did a picture of someone that represented an aspect of me and I knew it was a turning point. It wasn’t very good, but I’ve still got it and… I loved it. Then I gave up art for a long time and in 2008 I started again. I met this German girl who was an art student and we started chatting about art and I became really enthusiastic about it again. I put up an ad on Gumtree for nude models — I felt like a dirty old man, it was horrible — but when I met them I had a contract drawn up to say the pictures wouldn’t be used for anything else. I took some photos of one girl who arrived and her legs were like hairier than mine and I couldn’t really use her. The next girl I used was incredibly angry and I couldn’t use her either. I was kind of like, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’, and then I found Katie. This girl called up who was nineteen and I just thought she’s too young, she’s nineteen and I’ve got to take photos of her. She was the most amazing model ever. She just kind of looked up into the distance and there it was. Amazing. First picture, boom!
 

How difficult is it to find nude models?

I just ask people. I remember asking three people in one night. I had to have a few beers, but then I was like, ‘I’m an artist’.

It’s weird, but people get excited at the idea of having a portrait of themselves. What’s interesting is that they get vulnerable and shy

Some people don’t, so everyone reacts differently. And I get really nervous because I know that when I’m taking photographs that it’s that very vulnerable space for them and for me because I know that they’re nervous and shy so I start shaking. It’s very weird. I show them the photos — sometimes people don’t want to see — but if we get a good pose I get really excited and say, ‘look this is amazing, you look incredible, what do you think?’ and it’s a collaborative experience. So it’s not just me shooting and being like, ‘wow, thanks bye’. I try to engage them in the process.
 

Image: ‘Stare’

Do you think there’s a difference between being an artist who’s based in Sydney and being an artist who’s based in Cape Town?

Yes, there is. I don’t know…

I don’t necessarily think people are more open-minded in Sydney, but I mean for the little amount of work I did there it seemed to be more welcoming

I have exhibited in a group show at Everard Read and I sold one piece after a while there, but it’s like people just aren’t interested in it, it seems. You know on Tumblr people are always sharing images, reblogging and that’s cool, but I’d love to become an international artist. I don’t think I’ll become a South African artist. I just don’t see it happening. I think the art is more international.
 

You’re work is up on Lost at E Minor, which is an international art platform. Do you think South Africans have to be more actively aggressive in getting their work out there to get international recognition?

It’s really difficult and I’m learning as I go along. But it’s starting a blog or website, sharing on Facebook, Twitter, getting as many people as you can to see it. The first time I tried to send work to Lost at E Minor I submitted four stories of other artists and myself and the guy only published one of an American artist I know. So it took someone else getting published. I also think I’m quite shy — I get along with people — but I’m shy to ask for stuff, so networking is difficult.

You have to get in touch with people and create a context to work in. You’ll never get a reply just sending stuff to galleries. Ever.

Image: ‘Julia’

You were saying that South Africans are a tough crowd to please. Do you think that street art has gained a lot more momentum here than private art?

Yeah, street art seems to be the new thing. Sometimes I feel a bit despondent because my art feels quite traditional. I have friends who are street artists, who do amazingly well. They go all over the world exhibiting, they get invited places, and you can collaborate in street art. Not to sound condescending, but it’s like the pop-art of now. It can have a message or it can just be beautiful.

Their stuff is so covered as well. It’s on a building or a wall and people are always so interested to see that kind of stuff, and they can watch you while you work. For me, I see one aspect of it as being urban improvement. Some cities have sculptures, for example.

you go to Rome and there are sculptures everywhere — and it’s amazing — but street art can do the same in certain cities. It gives a cultural sense.

I like some street artists a lot.
 

You describe your art as traditional art and nude artwork has been around for a while. Why do you think that there is still a stigma attached to nude art?

I don’t know. I’ve done a few things.

I used to design sex toys. My boundaries around vulnerability and being open about things are quite large.

I really strive for honesty, which is what I try to put into my work and when I made sex toys they were these beautiful, beautiful hand-blown clear glass — they almost looked like ornaments. Pink stems or black stems in these amazing boxes and I designed everything. They didn’t sell here. Everyone who saw them was like wow, you could put them on a mantelpiece, they were lovely. People either weren’t ready for it or they didn’t get the idea of having it as an exclusive gift. So maybe I’m on the wrong track altogether, I don’t know. For me it’s about the quality of work. Stuff you can really feel proud about.

I often wish my art was smarter. I wish it was so creative that I could blow everyone’s minds or be an amazing street artist, but you kind of have to accept who you are and that’s what I do because of who I am.

Image: ‘Katie’

Any pet peeves in art?

(Laughs) how many pages do you have? Let me preface it by saying

maybe I don’t get a lot of art. Maybe something’s missing in me that sees the depth of some of the art I don’t like. There needs to be work or talent that you can see in the art

When I saw the article about Tilda Swinton in a glass case in the Museum of Modern Art. You can say it’s our voyeurism as human beings but you can also watch reality TV. It’s the same message. Someone said it was a feminist piece because she was like a caged animal but she’s in a glass case and she’s comfortable and having a nap in her day clothes so just maybe I don’t get it, but I think it’s contrived and I don’t like stuff that feels contrived, because it’s not honest. That’s what I would say. Art that feels dishonest and contrived. Otherwise everything becomes art.
 

How would you describe the mood of your work?

Unfortunately I connect more to sadness than to happiness, I think. It’s a feeling that resonates more with me. And I suffer from depression and I’m getting better, but I suppose I’m just on a different path to other people. I get depressed and lost and overwhelmed and other days I feel really good.

Image: ‘Katie’

Images: Brett Williams
Interview: Ra’eesa Pather

Image: Brett Williams

You describe your work as evoking emotional rawness through the human body. How do you evoke emotion through the structure of the body as opposed to facial expression?

The way that I work is I take photographs of my subjects. I’ll take around 200 shots and some people work well and some people don’t. From those 200 I’ll find a pose that resonates with me, and it’s usually to do with vulnerability or emotional rawness.

They’re showing something they wouldn’t usually show in public.

Do you focus on nudes because of the vulnerability aspect?

Yeah, and it’s easier to draw skin than clothing! (laughs)
 

Your subjects aren’t stereotypically beautiful. They’re not all young or skinny…

For me beauty is such a subjective thing. I don’t necessarily want to draw super-models. I see beauty in aspects of people rather than in the whole. So, it would be in the shine of your eyes, or the shape of your nose, or the turn of your lips. There’s beauty in the parts that make up someone’s physicality.
 

Image: The Human Landscape, ‘Kimby’

In your drawings the skin isn’t smooth and you can see the veins coming through. It’s very detailed.

Yes, I get sucked into the details sometimes. I don’t want to be a super-realist, for me it’s much more expressive, but I’m also colour-blind. The tones that I use and the way that chalk works certain colours tend to come through so they look translucent or transparent.
 

Is that why you use chalk?

Yeah, I mean I find it frustrating because

I can’t often determine what colours are which until it’s too late. I get really frustrated. I stand there for ages looking at the photograph I’ve taken on my laptop and I look at my paper and I look at my chalks and I just go blank for ages

That’s why it takes me so long to do artworks. It takes me anything from two weeks to a month to do something. There’s one I just started, and my friend Hayden looked at and said ‘it’s really good man, but why is her face green?’. It’s like shit I thought it was great. It’s mistakes that I make, and at school I always found painting quite difficult and I started working with oil pastels and that led me to chalks.

What I really love is that you get your fingers in it. So it’s almost like you’re sculpting, and you’re touching the paper so it’s a really personal experience for me. By the end of the picture my fingertips are usually worn through, and I have to wait for like a week or two before I do the next one.
 

On Tumblr you’ve posted incomplete art that you’re progressively working on. In all the images you finish the face and the upper body before you’ve added to the rest of the body…

I work down. I always work down for practical reasons. I used to work on the floor in my garage, and it’s depressing (laughs). You’re down there and you’re always looking over the picture and there’s shadow. Then I started putting it up, which was difficult for me to do. I was nervous, but it was a practical reason for me to work from the top down. I also have to remember skin shades, because they’re not always the same so I like to work on certain sections at a time otherwise I can’t get it out properly.
 

Image: The Human Landscape, ‘Lucinda’

If you have difficulty seeing the colour of the chalk then how do you know which chalk to use?

Not to make it sound in anyway supernatural, but I kind of have a feeling for light and dark. It’s something that I’ve worked on for a long time and I have to trust that what I’m doing will work out. Inevitably when I start I’m terrified.

I don’t enjoy art when I start, I hate it

I’m filled with anxiety when I start doing a piece because I have all this fear that I’m going to screw it up and I can’t erase it. So everything that I do gets sprayed and if you use dark chalk it leaves a stain that you can’t erase. Every time I work it has to be right the first time.
 

In terms of vulnerability, your art seems to experiment with different perspectives.

Yeah, there’s a dominance and submission I like to play with as well. So if you’re viewing it and the art piece is high on the wall then she’s looking down at you and you’re looking up at her. It’s a little bit confronting but I quite like it. So what if it’s confronting? I struggle with pseudo-intellectual art, I really do because it’s like ‘wow what a big idea’ when in fact for me it’s not often such a big idea, it’s just… like Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case at MoMA. But then again, everyone’s projecting what they feel.

In every relationship whenever you look at somebody, whenever you have an interaction with somebody there’s someone who’s dominant and someone who’s submissive. And if they’re both dominant you have a fight (laughs).
 

Image: The Human Landscape, ‘Beyonce’

One of your portraits is called ‘Beyonce’ and another is titled ‘Candy’, but then you also use normal names like ‘Katie’. How do you decide what to name your work?

I wanted to be clever and have these amazing names and then I thought I’ll just call them after the people so it doesn’t detract from what’s going on in the picture.

For me, it’s about not detracting from the art, which is why I use either a plain background or no background, because everything is about the body. I don’t want to influence what people are thinking about the picture by giving them a title to go ‘oh it’s about that!’

I really think it’s so subjective and everyone projects their ideas onto art. I mean there’s one called the ‘Boy in the Bath’, which was of my son. He was in the bath in Australia and I took a photo of him because for me it was this very solitary piece. I actually called it ‘Isole’, which is ‘island’ because he feels like an island. That’s the only one I’ve done like that. I exhibited it at Art Sydney in 2008 and this woman went mental. She was like ‘oh you can just tell they’re all drug addicts, just look at him, look at the veins and the scars, and so I realised that it’s all about projection.
 

Tell us about your Human Landscape collection.

I needed a name for my new collection of work and I started thinking about the common theme between all of them. I thought that they’re all naked and their bodies are like a landscape. You’ve got the literal landscape and the metaphorical landscape, and I thought it worked very well. It’s the literal landscape — the folds, the wrinkles, the scars — and then it’s also the landscape we’ve created, the human landscape, what we see is beautiful, what we see is plain or not beautiful. It just encompasses all of that. That’s how I see it.

I’ve also tried to have a common theme with this because before it was just one-offs and I think that’s difficult to show people as a collection of work. You need things to tie together.

I know I only have white people in my pictures, but I want to do other cultures as well. I’m a little bit nervous because I’m colour blind and I really don’t want to screw it up (laughs).
 

Image: The Human Landscape, ‘Candy’

Is that why you focus on white people?

Also because they are so accessible. A lot of my art is of people I know, so I do feel uncomfortable sometimes asking strangers. But I’d like to explore that, definitely.

I’ve been called a misogynist as well. Years and years ago I did this piece of art and I put it up in this small gallery that’s no longer there and this woman had walked in and had said about my piece ‘oh my God, look at that piece, the guy is obviously a misogynist’

It was just a profile of a woman naked from the chest up and she looked like a Spanish opera singer. She had this beautiful face and she kind of projected straight onto my piece. There was nothing misogynistic about it. It was very weird.
 

You like to do art in winter. Why winter?

Less distraction. Less beaches, less people going out. People don’t go out so much — not that I go out — but you know, it’s not as alive so I get to sit in the studio and work, which is what I really like. If I could I’d work at night, but I’ve got a son and so I can’t do that. Working at night is great because there’s no sense of time. One of the reasons I don’t do clothing and I don’t do jewellery is that I don’t want it to have a time element. So I want it to be timeless in a way. With night, you also don’t have to put lines down so the sun doesn’t mess with what you’re doing. I love it and it’s very solitary. That’s a good thing and a bad thing.
 

Your work seems very driven by solitude.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking lately, trying to figure out what my work is about, because I don’t think I’m that insightful that I can write a PhD on my art. For me I’ve started thinking lately that maybe I’m projecting my own vulnerability… it has to be because I’m the artist so what I’m choosing are obviously going to be my filters, which for art is vulnerability in the sense of emotional honesty, and stuff like that. We’re not all perfect and that’s what I’m attracted to. I used to be attracted to bones and bone structure, but now I’m attracted to that sense of vulnerability.
 

Image: ‘Boy in the Bath’

Images: Brett Williams
Interview: Ra’eesa Pather

Eftihia Stefanidi returns from the 64^th Cannes Film Festival – one of the most successful in years – and reports on the films that glowed in the dark during two weeks of unlimited screenings, pouring chilled rosé,  and sleepless nights. So, without further ado to follow is the first part of this enthralling three-part review…

PART 1 – THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT

Woody Allen’s ‘Out of Competition’ opening film Midnight in Paris, with its light-hearted tribute to the Parisian spirit, could not even slightly prepare us for what we were about to witness at the first screenings of the 64^th Cannes Film Festival. Politely described as ‘unsettling’ – the first films thrown on the critics’ table explored a wide range of themes on child abuse for all tastes:  paedophilia, violence, parental abandonment, kidnapping, evil adolescence – you name it.

Lynne Ramsay bravely paved the way with We Need to Talk About Kevin, a slick drama staring flawless Tilda Swinton, playing a mother who struggles to cope with her vicious son, Kevin, and the aftermath of his actions. Tackling the intriguing subject of evilness in children, the question is left to linger as to how much of Kevin’s condition is a result of parental negligence or simply pure chance. Striking looking new comer Ezra Miller (Kevin) employs an abundance of ‘evil looks’ on the verge of being ludicrous and John C. Reilly compliments as the one-dimensional father figure. Still those flaws are in fact minor, and what stands out is an unusual and intelligent story told with intricate flashbacks, managing to keep you on your toes wondering where Kevin’s vice comes from.

Even if Ramsay’s style is much her own, one could not help but think of school violence champ Gus Van Sant who would have more likely made a film like this rather than Restless, his latest version of young Shakespearean love (screened at Cannes’ sidebar Un Certain Regard). The American director gives his take on a dark romantic tale, in which boy falls for girl dying from cancer. With Restless, Van Sant follows the new-age romantic comedy laws, in which couples – apart from subtly gorgeous – must be extraordinary unusual and interesting, some very niche habits being the triggers for their attraction (in this case: regular funeral attendances, book reading on birds and a Japanese kamikaze pilot ghost from WWII as ‘best friend’). This is not the actual problem though – after all, we are talking about cinema, a place where we have agreed on being fooled by the amorous drama of hopeless love. But in Restless, the conventions fail to transgress, for the idealised romance has neither a foundation to support the couple’s bond, nor any subversive rhythm that could impose it soundly. Gus Van Sant is a favourite, but what I’m guessing is that he might be more inspired when he is not in love.

Poliss by Maïwenn Le Besco (which, to the surprise of many, received the Jury Price Award) redefined the child abuse topic, dealing directly with all its possible manifestations. An ensemble of police officers in action during their daily grind at the Child Protection Unit, the film studies their working ethos, as well as their intertwined private lives. Arguably an unnecessary role on her behalf, Maïwenn casts her self as the mute and introvert photographer that documents the Unit before she sparks some romance with one of the officers. Comprised mainly by a number of hardcore interviews with potential paedophiles and traumatised children, the applied documentary realism and TV-series mise-en-scène makes Poliss exhilarating and exasperating at the same time. Collided together, the film’s episodic and over-dramatic scenes make one long cinema – verité saga of comradeship, with some brief bursts of acting excellence that shine through.

One might assume we would be holding a PhD on the child matter by now, but things got even more nasty and scratchy with Michael, a first feature by Markus Schleinzer.  A casting director by profession (see Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon, to name but a few), Schleinzer picks the most apt and disturbing face to play Michael, a 35-year-old ordinary man with an ordinary job, who keeps his secrets locked in his basement. There resides a 10-year-old boy, tolerating occasional physical abuse by his kidnapper, but also taking part in the usual ‘family’ rituals. There is a certain mood created in the film that keeps you gripped within its mystery, as Michael’s expressionless face reveals neither pleasure nor remorse. However, the inscrutability of his intentions makes it an uncomfortable viewing, its impenetrability resulting to unsolved moral dilemmas and a suspenseful finale open for interpretation.

Code Blue

Following a successful de-sensitisation on violence, no fear did I feel when I consented to enter the screening of Code Blue, as part of the Director’s Fortnight, which came with the warning: “some scenes of the film might hurt the audiences’ feelings”. An austere and lonely nurse softens when caressing people that are in the threshold of dying, but failing to interact with her environment allows her perversely suppressed temperament to arise. The film soon turns into an ‘experiment’ as the clinically empty interiors host a few decadently appalling sexual acts. In a way, Polish director Urszula Antoniak is more interested in the spectacle and the mood that cinema can provoke than mere story-telling. Not for the faint-hearted, Code Blue is as art-house as it gets, so be prepared for some distorted, but physiologically nuanced 85 minutes that might feel as an eternity.

Words & Holga Images by Eftihia Stefanidi