The vanGogh of South Africa: Phillemon Hlungwani

Phillemon Hlungwani was born in 1975, in Giyani, Thomo Village, in Limpopo and now lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. He comes from a family of artists, and says that ‘art chose him’. He works in a variety of printmaking mediums, and also draws with charcoal. He attributes his mother as the impetus for his career, because she gave him charcoal from the hearth in their home. He says of his female subjects: ‘In my art I used to depict women that symbolized my mother. She is the one who encouraged me to make art. The women in my art are shown working because they are equal’.

Hlungwani work expresses his Christian and cultural beliefs. He feels a strong spiritual connection towards trees as a place for prayer and worshipping them, so trees are often represented in his work. His work often depicts the Tsengelendotwe tree found in his environment. It bears a fruit which they would mix with the fresh milk from the herd and drink as a milkshake. His landscape images refer to self, family and his cultural history.

Utilizing his upbringing to inform his work via traditional customs and cultural practices of his community, Hlungwani draws images of himself as a young herdboy tending the family goats. He understands the bushveld landscape intimately from his early years and he depicts scenes of small town life and a hard work ethic as few artists can or want to experience it for themselves. 

As a point of comparison, the ‘plein aire’ painters of the Barbizon School, and the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists understood suffering and toiling under the sun to paint their pictures. Yet, theirs was a point of observation –something not a part of their own experience. Hlungwani, very much in the same vein as Vincent vanGogh did with his drawings of the miners and potato farmers, shows us a way of life for the people from his village. He shows us the quiet moments crossing town with one’s good for the market, or a child following its mother to and from town. He shows us the family working together , tilling their fields and trying to raise a decent crop to feed the clan. 

Hlungwani’s depictions of the living conditions of his people - ramshackled clapboard homes in a hot, dry country, sting with a sense of poverty, and cultural awareness, for we understand that the artist describes a current situation in South Africa, not some quaint historical telling of a time long past. These renditions of South African life are are minder that the world hasn’t entirely caught up to a 21^st century standard of high-tech living. The town may be poor, but they are unified in their existence and look to be at peace and accept their existence as being what God intended for them. There is a quiet working of the land and one feels as if we were looking at one of Paul Gauguin’s rural Normandy-inspired pictures.

Still the curious thing in Hlungwani’s work isn’t the subject as much as what’s going on around the subject. He fills his skies and compositions with swirling dotted lines and circular arcs that surround the people walking to work; creating a dance of lines that equally encircle a tree in a field and a woman carrying a basket on her head. The abstractions of these lines activate his compositions in a way we are not used to seeing. It’s as though the marks could be a preliminary method the artist uses to begin drawing his subjects, but they are left in the picture, not erased or cut out of it, so they must have more significance than originally thought.

They could be trails of flies or bugs surrounding the subjects or maybe they have something to do with the state of chaos that surrounds us all. They could be that and more, but they would appear to be something ‘other’ than what one sees in this earthly realm. They would appear to be  traceries of some human presence or spirit, some soul that surrounds the subject – letting us know , as we see in Tintoretto’s ‘Last Supper’, that there is more in our daily realm if we but look for it.

His work effortlessly segues between media showing a mature vision. His work is deceptively simple and drawn with tenderness, still there is a sinewy strength to his line which so perfectly suits his subject and the results are astoundingly direct and sensitive.

Hlungwani is a young artist well on his way to becoming a promising star  as he gains critical attention. South Africa has a notable printmaking tradition, and has produced many fine artists that mainly show within the country, but Hlungwani’s work speaks about his roots and beyond his cultural borders with his life-sized prints. They are accomplished,  impressive and ambitious. Hlungwani has started to exhibit his work outside of South Africa and one senses that this artist will make as fine a mark as vanGogh did with his drawing s and the spiritual component present in his Starry Night. Hlungwani is generous with his time and teaches and encourages younger artists to pursue their dreams. He is a printmaking gem that will grow more brilliant with time and prestige.

Education:  

            Johannesburg Art Foundation, 2000

            Artist Proof Studio printmaking certificate, 2000.

            WITS School of Art, 2004

Commissions:

            Murals for the Johannesburg Development Agency,  South African Governmental            

            offices, MTN,The Standard Bank Art Gallery, Bell Dewar and Hall.

Awards:       

            King Korn competition winner, 2000-2001

            Finalist for the Absa Gallery competition

            Ampersand Fellowship, 2009

Professional Experience: 

            Coordinator and facilitator of APS professional artists program

            Teacher of papermaking

            Facilitator of Paper Prayers workshops

            Coordinator of NOAH’s arks art teaching project

Nigeria’s National Pride: Printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya

Wanting to explore some other parts of the globe, I recently came across the work of internationally renowned Nigerian printmaker, painter and sculptor Bruce Obomeyoma Onobrakpeya. He was born in 1932 in Agbarha-Otor in Delta State. The son of an Urhobo carver, he was raised as a Christian, but also learned traditional Urhobo beliefs. His family moved to  Benin City where he studied art under Edward Ivehivboje, and took drawing classes at the British Council Art Club. From 1953–1957, Onobrakpeya taught art at Western Boys High School, and  the Ondo Boys High School.

Onobrakpeya’s formal art training began at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, (now called the Ahmadu Bello University) in Zaria. He was a founding member of the college art student group called the Zaria Arts Society, a.k.a. the Zaria Rebels. Onobrakpeya later said the group helped him shaped his artistic concepts and encouraged him to find his own style. He later attended printmaking workshops in Ibadan, Oshogbo, Ife and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Maine. 

As one of the first generation of artists whose training was based on contemporary Western traditions of representational art, much of his work still portrays a style more connected with his traditional Urhobo folklore, myths and legends. He uses elongated figures similarly found in Medieval Christian and Byzantine art, and discards the renaissance rules of perspective to conjure up his own version of the supernatural. Onobrakpeya also has developed a writing style (Ibiebe) of invented ideographic geometric and curvilinear glyphs. These designs incorporate his interests in Chinese, Japanese, Ghanaian and Nigerian calligraphy with Urhobo imagery. Ibiebe glyphs are abstract, and for Onobrakpeya they seek universal truths.

Onobrakpeya has received numerous prestigious awards, including the following:

                Honorary D. Litt. from the University of Ibadan

                Honorable Mention from the Venice Biennale

                Pope John Paul II Award

                Fulbright Exchange Scholar 

                UNESCO’s Living Human Treasure Award

                Nigerian Creativity Award, by the Federal Government of Nigeria

Since his first one-man exhibition in 1959, Onobrakpeya has exhibited his work widely throughout the United States, Europe and Africa. His work are included in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Gallery of Art in Lagos and The Vatican Museum.  He has also been included in several documentaries on Nigerian artists and his own work.

In a career spanning over fifty years, Onobrakpeya has discovered, innovated and perfected printmaking and relief sculpture techniques that are uniquely Nigerian. As a printmaker, he prefers to work in Relief, Collograph, and Etching. His projects range from historical portraiture, commentaries on social unrest, mythical tales and religious subject matter. The results of his efforts are rich, tactile surfaces and compositions with iconic figures, overlapped in a nebulous space. The colors are densely multi-layered and his images pulsate with life. They show a great appreciation for the complexities of dual existence both in this world and that realm of folktales, and cultural heritage. In that regard he share affinities with Paul Gauguin. His prints intertwine freely with his interests in other tangible media, and we are enriched from the experience.

Finally, in 1998,  Onobrakpeya created an NGO, called the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation. bofoundation.org/ It organizes the annual Harmattan Workshops for international artist retreats in his home town of Agbara Otor. The foundation  encourages artists opportunities to improve and develop their skills, all the while increasing the public's awareness of African art .

The Enchantments of Hawaii: Prints by John Melville Kelly

Our imaginations soar when we think of the beautiful Hawaiian islands; the people, the colors, the exotic flowers and warm waves lapping onto the beaches. Those things are fondly recalled of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific", "Bali High" and the Tahitian travels by 19th c. French artist Paul Gauguin.

John Melville Kelly came to Hawaii in 1923 and like so many others, he fell in love with the place and stayed the rest of his life. He originally came from the deserts of Arizona, so its no wonder he became enchanted with the lush and exotic colors found in Hawaii. Kelly was a real estate executive, and eventually turned away from it all to become an artist. Thank goodness. He did paintings and prints, and the ones you'll see today show an unseen, or rarely seen, view of this man's 'Tahiti'.

Kelly drew people working on the beaches, fixing fishing nets, workers sorting products for market, women sewing on the ground, and dozens of portraits of women in exotic gowns surrounded by flowers. Some of the portraits resemble a more formal study of the figure, and the fact they are Polynesian is the only thing that separates them from  figure studies similarly found in thousands of portraits studios worldwide. As with the study of the woman pictured at the top, Kelly has an excellent grasp of line and defining the figure in a measured, cross-hatched study and it emanates sensuality. Contrasting that with his portrait of the old man pictured below, his line becomes more loosely defined but still captures the the figure's masculinity and elegant features . Here his line is more reminiscent of Anders Zorn, a contemporary of John Singer Sargent, and it looses and finds the figure in a energetic, coagulated frenzy.

Kelly's love of the Hawaiian people was honest and not a touristy view of island life. His fascination with the Hawaiians and their daily existence is akin to the manner in which Gauguin portrayed his view of the Tahitians, but the work is less exotically symbolist-colored than Gauguin, and more in tune with the warm colors he found in Hawaii. This figure below is one where Kelly experimented with a detailed figure found within an abstract field of texture and color,

which for me is more alike to the lost and found figure compositions of Sargent and Whistler, and has references to the Asian-inspired prints of Cassatt. The homage is apparent, and we can be as enthralled with Hawaiian culture as he was.