Current Project

Recently I've started a new body of work, “Through Jo’burg”. The works are inspired by a walk through the above landscape.

- While exploring the inner city of Johannesburg a few months ago, I managed to get access into various buildings with some incredible views of Jo’burg. From many sketches and hundreds of photos , one stuck out. A view from a building on Fountain Street, Fordsburg (above).
- The painting is almost 2 metres high. While working on the piece, my mind kept zooming into the landscape and I imagined walking around inside it. Who are the characters in there and what are their stories? So I decided to find out, I walked from the foot of the building in the foreground, through the landscape, to the Telkom tower in the distance, sketching and taking photographs along the way. The route took me through Fordsburg, into Newtown, across the Nelson Mandela bridge into Braamfontein and to the Telkom Tower (I was careful, my experience was nothing but pleasant). The images I gathered of people in cafés and shops to sky scraper street scenes in this fascinating city will be the subject matter of the body of work.

Themes that I’ll be looking at:

- Macro vs. Micro- zooming out (quiet, collective) and zooming in (busy, subjective).
- The natural flow that exists in an energetic city.
- Objective vs. Subjective. Everyone has their own perspective and way of experiencing things.
  What are the variations and what connects us?

Here are a few sketches from the first walk:

I got carried away and started playing with Google earth:

These images are great to use as drawing references, they take the work to a level that is almost abstract.

Right: Image taken from Google maps of an aerial view of the Telkom Tower.

Below: Aerial view of Fountain Street.

Below: Other images from Google earth. These images are fascinating, they are stretched and skewed and stitched together by the Google earth image vehicle- another reality.