Photo: Last day at the Everard Read gallery

A panorama shot of the Everard Read Gallery show.  Click on it to see the whole thing.

The last day was today.  I went in and greeted everyone who was visiting (but didn't take their picture) and thanked the gallery for their hard work.

Graeme Shackleford's article about City Chromatic

Everybody reads our little local newspaper, known in my neighborhood as the Rosebank Killarney Gazette and in others as the Chronicle, the Herald, etc.

Graeme Shackleford wrote a nice article about City Chromatic.  You can read it here in a piece called "Niebuhr Paints the City".

Cityscape with Memories

This commission is going to live in Australia.  The people wanted an amalgam view of Johannesburg so I combined three perspectives and then overlaid local figures.

Time Magazine Asks Me for Joburg Tips

How to Kick Back in the World Cup Cities is a feature Time Magazine is currently running.  They asked for suggestions from "prominent South Africans" and somehow I qualified. 

Here's my text.  Go to the site to see what the other people suggested one does in Cape Town, Durban, and Joburg when the games are not on.

HERMANN NIEBUHR
38, artist

A brisk walk through the Wilds, one of our oldest parks, would be followed by quiche, cappuccino and the Mail & Guardian at the Service Station café, tel: (27-11) 726 1701, in Melville. After perusing the galleries on Jan Smuts Avenue, I'd head to my studio in Fordsburg for some painting and eat lunch at Shayona, tel: (27-11) 837 2407 — the best vegetarian Indian food in town. I'd work for a few more hours, then call up some friends and go for calamari and prawns at the Troyeville Hotel, tel: (27-11) 402 7709, my scruffy, friendly local, specializing in Mozambican cuisine (there are always takers for this outing). Last, I'd take the M2 highway — the scenic route — circling the city with its lit-up skyscrapers and mine dumps back home to my apartment in Killarney.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Five - FInished!

After a two week hiatus in the Karoo, I came back home and finished this painting.  It's hanging on the wall in our flat and my wife said she wished we could keep it!  It's 1m x 1.5m, nice and big. 

New Joburg Painting, Stage Four

I've worked on the buildings a lot and now I've also laid in the sky.  The painting takes on much more of a 3-D look.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Three continued

In these blog entries, I'm documenting the process of painting a complex cityscape, step by step.

Plugging away, still on stage three, in which the buildings in the foreground come to life one by one.  Next I'll work on the sky.

New Joburg Painting, Stage Three

In Stage Three, I pick out surfaces of different buildings and paint them in their right shades.  This stage takes a long time, as you can imagine.

Inspirational Film

Last night I attended this pre-screening.  I know the director, Tim Greene, and he is using some of my paintings in a later episode of this series.

The showing was held atop the arts building in Braamfontein, the one shaped like a flying saucer.  There was a great turnout, and I loved the film.  The team (it's produced by Curious Pictures) put together a wonderful combination of images and sound in this first episode, on the Karoo.  They used paintings by my old colleague Ben Coutavidis, as well, which evoked the landscape beautifully.

I enjoyed meeting Johnny Clegg and didn't hesitate to ask him, based on the inspiration of the programme we'd just seen, "What work are you doing to take this country forward?"  He responded positively to my question, as did Ivan Vladislavic who was attending.  I was fired up by the film and ready to commit to making South Africa what it can be.

New Joburg painting, stage two

I'm in stage two of this Joburg skyline painting.  Stage one was drawing in the black and white outlines of all the buildings, and now I'm working on the shading and contouring.

This is a commission for an executive who is moving to New York and will miss his Joburg.

I took the shot from the Carlton Centre, our tallest building (usually cited as the tallest building in Africa).  In the far distance, on the horizon, you can see the Brixton Tower.

Painting in The Joburg Guidebook

My friend Nechama Brodie is the author/editor of The Joburg Book, published in 2009.  It's an informative and well-written collection of history and geography, and I've enjoyed reading it.

Now she has been tasked to transform The Joburg Book into a handy guide for visitors.  She tells me it's nearly finished.

In turn, she asked me to provide an image for the new guidebook.  I sent her one painting, and we'll see what happens next.

Joburg with Bridge and Figures

I must say I really like this recent commission.  It has a "fun" feel but also a sense of dignity.

Panorama Tondos

These two tondos are the long-distance views of Joburg's central business district. 

The four pieces (with the two close-ups from yesterday's post) will hang in the entrance foyer of a corporate headquarters.

Downtown Tondos

This is what I've been working on, in between my new parenting duties.

Gallo House

Sometimes it's a single building that catches my eye.  This beauty, called Gallo House, sits in the centre of Joburg near the Fashion District.  I liked its Art Deco lines and the way it responds to the light.

Jeppe Overpass

I'm always seeking out new ways to look at Joburg.  It's a city that can be viewed from many directions.  Lately I've concentrated on the "bird's eye view":  not straight down, but at a flattering angle.  Joburg's geometry continues to fascinate me.

Langermann's Kop

I used to live near Langermann's Kop, a rocky ridge in "the heartbreak East" of Joburg.  The view of the skyline is fantastic, particularly at sunset.

Dekat Article by Carina van Heerden

 
I was featured in an article in the most recent Dekat magazine.  While the reporters interviewed me, I took them up onto the mine dumps and helped them choose vantage points from which to take photographs. They also published a number of my paintings from the mine series.

Here is an excerpt from the article, and you can read the full text after the jump:

“Without the gold mines Johannesburg would not have
been here, and the mine dumps are what’s left of that
era,” says Hermann. “That’s why the mine dumps are so
specifically ‘Johannesburg’: they are handmade and iconic
and they represent the reasons why we’re here.”

For the past 10 years, Hermann has been portraying
Johannesburg’s growth, decline and flow in his paintings
– from lights flashing past on the highway to picture-perfect
panoramas at sunset. His latest exhibition titled Mine is a
documentary of the mine dumps, from Randfontein on the
West Rand to Boksburg on the East Rand. In the middle
is the Top Star drive-in, also portrayed in Hermann’s
paintings, and so we set out to visit this legend out there on
the Johannesburg horizon.

The well-known, sky-high Ster-Kinekor screen still sits on
top of the mine dump next to Simmonds Street South, while
Johannesburg in all its glory buzzes in the background. “To
open a drive-in here was an absolute stroke of genius,”
Hermann tells us, squinting slightly against the bright sunlight.

Interview on Radio Today by Joburg heritage maven Flo Bird

I was interviewed on 1 December 2009 by Flo Bird, whose programme Heritage Today runs on the station Radio Today.  Here is the transcript:

Flo:  Now today I'm speaking to someone who has great and colourful meaning for us all, for all Joburg people, and that's Hermann Niebuhr, who has just opened an exhibition at the Anglo Gold Ashanti Gallery in Turbine Hall.  It's called "mine."  It has a double meaning, but it's about the mine dumps.  Welcome!

Hermann:  Good morning!  Thank you, Flo, and good morning to all your listeners.  It's a great pleasure to be here.  Just as you were talking about the Rissik Street Post Office [in the previous segment, about the historic building that burned down in the city centre and whether it would be restored or not], I sort of took my cue with the work I do, which is documenting Johannesburg, I took my cue from a line, and I can't remember exactly where it comes from, that "Johannesburg is a city that doesn't remember itself."

And it sort of struck me, like, "What's going on here?" that there's no books on Joburg, you know, you go to Cape Town and there are a gajillion coffee table books available in every bookstore.

Until Nechama [Brodie]'s The Joburg Book came along, there was to me a real lack of memorialising the city, celebrating the city, and documenting the city, in fact.  I know there were people doing stuff, there was stuff going on, but generally in the mainstream there just seemed to me to be a lack of it, and I was struck by that, you know -- the greatest city in Africa, effectively.  And we're not remembering it.

The work you're doing, and the work The Joburg Book is doing, and hopefully some of the work I'm doing and other people are doing is to elevate the city. I mean, we're going to have several visitors here next year [for the 2010 World Cup]...

Flo: We do hope for a little more than that!

Hermann:  Exactly!  And we've got a great city here.  Anyway, so my journey of documenting the city, of looking at it -- this is the third part of an exhibition trilogy of work I've done around Joburg, this one being the mine dumps. 

Interview by Fred de Vries

Fred de Vries is a well-known journalist who lives in Johannesburg. He writes for South African and Dutch publications.

This interview comes from his book The Fred de Vries Interviews: From Abdullah to Zille (2008, Wits University Press), a collection of 39 interviews with South African artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers.

Hermann Niebuhr
Fordsburg, Johannesburg, April 2007

Neon lights, dodgy characters, gunshots, the smell of junk food, traces of piss and vomit. Hillbrow doesn't seem the most alluring part of town to explore at night. And certainly not the place to get out of your car and take photographs of lobbies of dilapidated apartment buildings. But that's exactly what Joburg artist Hermann Niebuhr has been doing for the last two months. Those lobbies, devoid of physical human presence, form the basis of a new set of paintings.

"There are parts of Hillbrow where you keep the camera down, because they shoot back, ha ha," says Niebuhr in his studio in Fordsburg. On a more serious note he adds, "When I first started driving around Hillbrow, it was like yeeakgrrrrrr. Then, phase two, I stopped the car and took a picture. By phase ten you get out of the car and you're fine. And you realise you're unpacking a whole lot of your own crap. I'm not saying: wear a Rolex and walk around Hillbrow. Don't be stupid. But you can get out of your car. Nothing has ever happened to me. I walk into those lobbies and say: 'Hi, I'm here to take pictures.' Sometimes they chase me away, sometimes they say it's fine."

Niebuhr's latest project is the logical follow-up to his 2005 exhibition Night Ride Home, which encapsulated the nightly journeys from his studio to his house in Kensignton. It resulted in a beautiful, almost dreamlike overview at the Absa Gallery, full of blurred visions and shattered lights, a kind of Edward Hopper for the twenty-first century.

The new paintings seem to go even deeper. "As your language develops, you're able to describe more authentically the things that you can see," says Niebuhr. "That's what I'm doing now. I go into the buildings. And once you're inside them, they still carry the knowledge from when you first saw them and thought: oh my God."

Both projects form part of his exploration of the state of the city. They lead us to pertinent questions about our aims, ideals and sense of belonging. Is Joburg a failed project or a success? Why are we so scared? Is this fear justified?