SEEDS OF CHANGE - 1976 MICHAELIS REUNION EXHIBITION Page 20

SEEDS OF CHANGE

1976 Michaelis Reunion Exhibition 2019 UCT Irma Stern Museum 3 – 24 August 2019

Philip Willem Badenhorst was invited to exhibit at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town in August 2019 to coincide with his retirement from teaching at the Hoboken Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp Belgium where he has been living since graduating from Michaelis in 1976. His idea to share this opportunity with a group of friends, all of whom studied at Michaelis School of Fine Arts, saw a Reunion Group Exhibition “Seeds of Change” materialize. All five participants completed their studies at Michaelis in 1976 and although its now 43 later and they are all reaching their ‘mature years’, they are all still producing work, upholding the fact that artists never retire.

The selection procedure was as follows: You had to have finished the four years at Michaelis and you had to still be ‘burning the midnight oil’, working as an artist. Simon Stone (living in Cape Town), Asiya Clarke /née Patsy Warton (living in Luton, England), Giovanna Biallo-Stone (living in Cape Town), Julia Beeton-Kuhlmann (living in Johannesburg) and Philip Willem Badenhorst (living in Antwerp, Belgium) are the artists that make up the group. Amazingly they always have been and still are in contact.

Stone usually starts with water colour sketches which get transferred in oil or encaustic paint to canvas. He is primarily a figurative painter who incorporates and combines landscapes, buildings, objects, figures and abstract elements into his work, aiming to achieve a sense of inevitability or rightness. Different images are often juxtaposed together in one work.

Giovanna Biallo-Stone, Eye Tap, oil on canvas

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Julia Beeton-Kuhlmann, Olive Trees, Oil on Canvas

Asiya Clarke, Pareidolia 4, acrylic on canvas

Philip Willem Badenhorst Verliesfontein, Acrylic on Canvas

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Julia Beeton-Kuhlmann, St Lucia, Oil on Canvas

“All five participants completed their studies at Michaelis in 1976 and although its now 43 later and they are all reaching their ‘mature years’, they are all still producing work, upholding the fact that artists never retire.”

Philip Willem Badenhorst, Nooitgevonden, acrylic and graphite on canvas

Simon Stone, Vase and Stripe; oil on canvas

Clarke photographs water, using this imagery as a basis for her paintings. She reinterprets this apparently random data to find meanings and metaphors. The symmetry found in reflections relates to the body, particularly the face. Figuration appearing within abstraction, presenting a private gateway to a parallel universe. Her works are informed by Sufism that seeks an immersion in the universal.

Biallo-Stone creates colour fields in ranges of tones and hues that can live together in harmony or discord. Careful consideration is given to the surface of the oil paint and the ‘edges’, where one colour meets another, are emphasized. She is inspired by Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Bridget Riley.

Beeton-Kuhlmann uses strong flat colours depicting patterns found in nature and the space around them. Landscapes offer her a version of the natural world and she uses this subject to portray her own collection of shapes and lines. Sometimes she stitches with coloured cotton as a pure line on her surface.

Badenhorst was inspired by the reading of Karel Schoeman’s novels. A veritable homecoming offered in Schoeman’s imagining of an inner sensibility, the layered texture of his silences and the ever present inward leading path. All titles of the works are derived from farm names in Schoeman’s novels. Badenhorst’s creative process is experienced as a form of meditation through the construction of multiple layers of thinly applied acrylic paint.

Besides the joy of meeting the works and each other, they wish to be paying a tribute to their motivating mentor-lecturers during their four years of study: Neville Dubow*, Katrine Harris*, Stanley Pinker*, Richard Wake*, Kevin Atkinson*, Alan Crump*, Patricia Atkinson*, Andrew Todd*, Dimitri Fanourakis, Jules van de Vijver, Cliff Bestall, Gavin Young and Peggy Delport, who at 82, will deliver the opening speech at 11h00 on Saturday 3rd of August, 2019. (* deceased)

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