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The Casablanca Girls

The first place I saw in Paris in 1982 was a small boutique hotel on the Left Bank. Someone at the information desk at Orly either wanted to give me a treat, or to damage me for life (sometimes this can be the same thing...) when they booked me in there. Welcome to the Hotel California?

A shock awaited me in the foyer. The hotel was filled with exquisite young women, myself the only male in the place. I reacted as any hot blooded young man would, with total terror.

There was, I remember, a tea garden with a verandah, and in the shade chatting in a thousand languages, goddesses were artfully scattered. Stumbling through quicksand, I felt my way towards a chair, sat down as casually as I could, and ordered a cup of coffee.

Somehow I must have managed to chat to one of them, because the next thing I remember is walking down the side of the Seine with two or three of these visions. They were, and I don't expect any credibility - nor any sympathy - they were models, fashion models and glamour models - garnered from all over the world and flown to Paris to have a shot at an international career by some super-agent like Johnny Casablanca. And this hotel, this hotbed of sensuality, was where they were brought together before being let loose on poor unsuspecting mankind.

I only stayed there one night, enjoying the most luxurious shower of my life, finding myself a cheaper hotel the next day. For seven months, I wandered all about the city, but somehow my walks never took me along that particular street again, victim of the terrifying power of sheer beauty. Slowly, over the years, I learned to feel comfortable with this power and learned to swim, and to enjoy swimming, with sharks. Truth is, that beauty needs its dark side, as light needs shadow, and flowers need earth.

Figure drawing workshop

Tuesday, 16th September to Friday, 19th, 9:30 until 3 daily, Simon's Town Library Hall.

Of all the skills we prize, life drawing is the greatest, and the most difficult to attain. This is my first opportunity in many years to dedicate a short course specifically to it. We shall cover all aspects of life drawing, including gesture studies, contour drawing, structure, anatomy, and light and shade. Phone or email me if you are interested.

Seeing the light

Light is the only thing we can see; light in all its variety of intensity, gloom, shadow, flash, flare and glow. As artists this is our primary task, to master the skill of rendering light; but more, to master the skill of seeing light.

The greatest masters are the ones who mastered the secrets of tone, the mystery of shadow, the transparencies of air, and the subtle variations of light washing over form.

Website

http://artistvision.org/

Workshops

For details on workshops and classes in Cape Town and Europe, click here

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Alchemy

Art is the fossil of the experience. When I told my class that, one day, I knew what I was saying, but it was only on reflection that I realised the truth of it.

In nature the fossil is formed by the slow transmutation of living tissue into rock, and in art it is formed by the slow transmutation of a living experience into paint or clay or rock or bronze. The one is transmuted into the other... there is no two. The fossil is the animal and the painting is the experience. The act of making a mark, a line or a brushstroke or a drag of the palette knife, and the mark, is one. As the dancer is the dance, so the painting is its own genesis.

The great artist is an instrument as much as his brush is. The essence of a work of art lies in the experience which infuses it. Our work is greater or meaner, reflecting the creative process and the celebration, the mystical union with the vertex of the moment in time, the moment in space. Our art must reflect life, passion, delicacy, energy, uncertainty... It IS all this. And this is my reason for rejecting empty, self-indulgent art and false, dishonest photographic copying. The art can never be more than the experience which ignites it.

The art of Ryno Swart