What the World Gave Me, 2013

What The World Gave Me
- Where words can’t produce meaning
Lindi Venter
2013
Oil on board
60,5 x 122 cm

          

inspired by:
Goya - Saturn Devouring His Son
Carravagio - Little Bacchus

Three Monarchs for Crucifixion, 2013

Three Monarchs for Crucifixion
- Nurture caging the noble mind
Lindi Venter
2013
oil paint on board

inspired by Bacon and Freud

Being Jan-Henri Booyens' Assistant

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

Please check out some more of Jan's art


http://janhenribooyens.tumblr.com/

http://avantcarguard.blogspot.com/