This sent to me by our favourite weather correspondent Lizza Littlewort:

It's been interesting watching the tide of new ideas in drawing/painting turn from a trickle into a flood. By now it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a full-blown tsunami, bringing massive changes in the global art world.

About six years ago a painter, Luc Tuymans, became the most talked-about artist at the Venice Biennale. But the biennale organisation refused to give him a prize because they 'didn't want to be seen to be encouraging painting.' By the next biennale there was a pavilion dedicated to painting, and by the one after that the main pavilion was chock full of the world's contemporary painting heavies like Tuymans and Dumas. They even wheeled out Francis Bacon for the show. I'd been hearing for years that painting has taken over European art
schools practically to the exclusion of anything else. It's a hard thing to imagine what would come out of it. So many people painting all at once is bound to produce something of interest. From the vantage point of South Africa one can but try to join the dots.

It's been reaching South Africa in a range of different streams for several years now. On the 'serious' end of the spectrum are global conceptual artists like Moshekwa Langa (one of my personal favourites right now), and the 'afropolitan' artists shown as a group at Michael Stevenson on the 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' show. Plus Lisa Brice, who's always a good benchmark of what's current, and new cooler washier drippier paintings by Penny Siopis. Cheeky of me, but I can't help noticing that the 'serious' crew all have a decidedly Dumas look about them. Guess you have to choose your influences with care if you want to be perceived as deep.

And then there are the 'unserious' sources, which are generating a huge range of seriously interesting ideas. Los Angeles outsider/skater culture and Japanese trolls alone have generated a massive groundswell of ideas. There have been ranges of hooded beasts and mutant reindeer and undead ghouls going on for years, a lot of which has been too cutesy to really say anything, but some of which has taken a really thought-provoking turn. Then there have been New York painters like Karen Kilimnik and Dana Schutz, satirising in genius slacker style the insane extremes of American culture with their works on, among others, Paris Hilton (yay!) and Michael Jackson.

There's no single direction in any of this, and each of us has our own reaction to it, but for me the first time I really saw the tide turn in Cape Town was when I was stopped in my tracks by an Early Friday poster by Georgina Gratrix. I couldn't believe there was anyone who could draw like that at Michaelis, it was just unheard-of to me. I continued to be gobsmacked and delighted when I came across the work of her contemporaries, Becky Haysom and Andrej Nowicki (whose name I don't think I can spell properly, but I'm trying). I swear if I was religious, this would have counted as the moment for me when god met me on a rocky road, and promised to create a flood that would wash the memories of Debora Poynton and Tanya Poole out of my mind forever. I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but holy Jesus, there's only so much one can bear without starting to crack.

Of course if you were a conspiracy theorist, which of course I am, then you would believe that this whole climate change had been orchestrated by the shadowy Illuminati in the form of Charles Saatchi, who decided there should be a “Triumph of Painting” and set about putting it into place using vast bulwarks of cash, and dredging up the ghost of Martin Kippenberger to lend authenticity to his claims. As for me, if this is the effect of my world being constructed
by a big ad mogul in the sky, I'm happy to float along with the tide.

Labels: Lizza, painting