Three months ago, on a hot summer
day our entire painting class (eight girls, including myself) were in great
anticipation for our new workshop to start with artist Jan-Henri Booyens.
He walked in and we all
kind of gasped for air. In front of us stood the most stereotypical weird
artist you would ever meet in your life - a modern Salvador Dalí, complete with
crazy eyes and mustache.
We were intrigued, scared, freaked out, but also ready for the most crazy and absurd time of our life. The first project was
to listen to a song and let the music inspire us to create an abstract
painting. It was an exciting project, except that i don't really create abstract work.
After the first week i only had a
few drawings and no paintings. During the second week, Jan couldn't make it to
the studio, but i went in my own direction, planning and creating three
big paintings of three seated figures. I painted expressionlessly, mixing colors on the board, not exactly considering the colors at all.
The third week arrived, along
with Jan. I completed one painting, was halfway with the next and planning
on starting with the third the following day. He asked me what on earth i was doing. Why do i use and like the colors. Because he just saw one big murky mess and
not the idealized, vibrant colors i saw in my head. I was very upset when he took my pallet
from my hand, squeezed out half a R45 tube of oil paint and started mixing
one big heap of color.
I was more annoyed when he
started applying paint onto my painting. In my eyes it messed up my
entire painting - applying lumps of paint, scraping it off, mixing more paint
and applying more. According to me the damage was done - it was beyond repair.
I came home that evening, enraged, thinking that i didn't want a figurative
painting with colors that didn't make sense or mean anything, that the painting
made me think of kitsch commercial art that gets sold in stupid galleries -
something that someone would buy that doesn't know a thing about art.
However, during the next two
weeks i stopped rejecting what i was being taught and instead started to see the
value in what i was being taught, opening my mind to see the place
where art had no rules. Art was free and through art we were free. Not like the
past few years in university where we were placed in a certain "open"
box and are then expected to come out of it again in third year, but just not
too much.
We started to enjoy having Jan-Henri around
in class, his input and way of doing things reminded me of my high school art teacher, who taught me about life and not just art. Art became fun again and i
looked forward to going to class every day.
Somewhere during our second
painting project, Jan asked if anyone wants to be his assistant. After
thinking about if i really wanted to help out this scary man, i decided that it can only be exciting and i could hopefully learn something through the experience.
I didn't know what to expect. It was all very scary, but thrilling at the same time. I
didn't really know a lot about abstract art, apart from that which we were
taught in school. Jan's art was completely different to anything that i was use
to. His paintings revealed something true about art. Unpretentious paintings coming from the core of human life - a honesty in painting. Free from the constraints of society, Jan lives. Lives for art - lives for life.
The more i mixed paint and
painted on the canvases, the more i learned about art; about life. I was absolutely honored to be
his assistant. Probably the coolest person you can ever be an assistant for.
I've learnt that art shouldn't be
put in an aesthetic realm as artists and critics so often do. Art should be raw and real, betray something of the soul.
That which all of us are, but most people deny. Art should always be fun. Art
should break the rules.
So should life.
We must live life. Live life care-free,
enjoying everything and not worrying about what society might
think of you. Why should you betray your being and soul for someone or something you don’t even
know? Covered up in false pretenses. See the real. Be real.
This journey has been one of rediscovering lost dreams and ideas and bringing them back to life. I learnt more during this past few months working with Jan than i have during this entire past two and a half years in art at university.
One of Jan's new paintings Human Error, 2013
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