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.