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.

Why the Karoo is the Place to Be

by Douglas Rogers

Telegraph.co.uk

I hate Hermann Niebuhr. It's late afternoon – magic hour – in the Klein Karoo, a fertile valley in South Africa's Groot Karoo desert, and I'm sipping a sweet muscatel on the veranda of Boesmanskop farm guesthouse cursing my old university friend.

Artist's Statement

This is the artist's statement I wrote in 2007 and had on my website for a long while:


Paintings take time. It's what has always attracted me to the act of making them - they won't be coaxed, cajoled or knocked out. The good ones take their own good time, the good ones thrill you every time. 

I began my career as a landscape painter, mainly because I felt that landscape was the best vehicle to explore the full range of paint's effects and how it affects us.  Translating landscapes into paintings; building up a personal lexicon to register the vastness of experiencing the landscape struck me as the ultimate ambition of a painter. 

I lived in the arid region of South Africa known as the Karoo for several years after graduating from Rhodes University. I produced works ranging from colour fields to photo-real representations of carefully chosen scenes. 

It was only when I started working with found objects (mostly old kitchen utensils found in the veld and often near deserted settlements) that I began to see the scope of introducing a third element directly into the paintings - reference to human habitation and its shaping of the landscape. These works became intimate archaeologies as well as traditional still lifes telling a typically South African story: the romanticization of poverty. 

Emerging from the idyllic world of the Karoo, I moved to the real-life city of Johannesburg. Johannesburg has proved fertile ground indeed for a painter used to big sky and big silence. 

Experiencing the city has been a far more passive process - more observer than participant - whereas the country demanded actively engaging the surrounding world, actively walking through it rather than watching it walk around you. My initial response was to tabulate things, culminating in the 2 larger grid paintings. Lists seemed a logical way to get my eye in. I then began a series of works about the inner city, night-charting my journey through the city to my studio. It culminated in a show called 'night ride home'. 

Traveling and producing work in Germany, Ireland and the United States have added to the bank of images waiting to be released into paint - in their own good time.