RED TIME

This was South Africa in the last years of apartheid. I was living and painting in Venda, what was then called a homeland in the north of the country. Village life turned around water, cattle, maize, heat and red earth. Everything seemed held like dust between endurance and expectation. Poverty, waiting, rumours of change, and the constant nearness of violence were part of the same air.

I had returned from Europe because South Africa, or home, still pulled at me like a magnet. I loved it and hated it at the same time. I loved the land, the light, the scale, the physical presence of the place. I hated the brazenness of apartheid, its casual certainty, its permission to divide and humiliate.

The watercolours came first. They were not minor preparations, but the first direct contact with the place. Quick, exposed studies of people, heat, red earth and village life. From them the larger acrylic paintings developed, carrying the same pressure into a more physical scale.

But this was also a time saturated with violence. People were waiting for change and believed that another life would somehow arrive with it. Cars, brick houses, electricity. At the same time, people were being hunted, beaten, murdered and burned. Violence moved through ordinary life, not outside it.

A friend who visited me every Thursday once left early because in his village they were about to burn a woman accused of witchcraft. A tyre would be forced over the victim’s head and set alight. Her maize had grown unusually well. That was enough. I remained there, watching and hearing about such horrors, until Nelson Mandela had been released.

The violence did not come from one side only. Apartheid was the governing structure, but its logic travelled through everything it touched. Hierarchy, punishment, suspicion, humiliation, belonging. Those who were crushed could turn on those still more vulnerable. The belief that one group has permission over another does not stay cleanly inside politics. It enters the village, the body, the field, the neighbour.

The brushwork in these works does not describe from a distance. It presses into the painting as if the image had to be found under pressure. The marks stay quick, exposed and unsettled, so that earth, figure, heat and violence exist in the same painted breath rather than as separate subjects.

These paintings are charged less by narrative than by condition. Their colour and brushwork hold heat, exposure, tension and ordinary life in the same field. Landscape, figure and violence are never fully separate. Red is not only colour. It is earth, heat, warning, blood, time.