our friends say its darkest before the sun rises... were pretty sure their all wrong..

here is an extract from Samora Chapmans article on how the street kids in durban are being swept away...

Everyday for the past 6 months, the Durban Metro Police have been rounding up street children, often beating them, and throwing them in the back of vans. According to Tom Hewitt, founder and CEO of the street childrens organization Umthombo, children are being harassed, beaten and pepper sprayed in these ruthless round-up operations. The kids are then driven out of the city as far as the department’s petrol tab allows and ditched outside Pietermaritzburg or down the South Coast. Alternatively they get dumped at “homeless shelters” where they have to share space, unsupervised, with a frightening mix of street dwellers and gangsters. Here they are often subjected to further abuse or coerced into crime. The citys by-laws against loitering are used as vague justification for these roundups.

read the rest of the article on the mahala website

this illustration from tyler b murphy shows off his exquisite style...
a t-shirt collaboration with killer clothing
tyler runs the sins of style tattoo parlor in cape town..
for richly finished tattoos...
the finest...

OH DAMN! there is a documentary coming out about the legendary prophets of the city...
THIS i cant wait to see! so glad its been done... so people can remember not to forget...

alex showed me the puma sutra pamphlet for pumas love equals soccer campaign..
he asked me - whats missing in all the pictures...

her face of course...
id like to have been in that design meeting when they were discussing why the female should have no identity...

which reminded me of this website a little... stop human trafficing
of course not as extreme... but symbolic of an overall mindset that allows for such small but largly symbolic gestures in the media to go unnoticed.

ive got to say i love love love this illustration by louis minaar
for the new album - skop skiet en donner by van coke cartel...

this track ' sweet' from JAAK is great...
hip hop from the cape flats is well established and ingrained into its youth culture...
this video is smooth.. simple but with beautiful moments reflecting the everyday life and feelings of life in the kaapse fletse...
sharp...*

i read this interesting article in the mail and guardian.
it talks about how our south african minister - Lulu Xingwana had been due to speak at the opening of a show by young black women artists at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg.

But instead of speaking walked out of the show.

Zanele Muholis images of naked women explore lesbianism and sexuality in a society where it is very difficult to speak about these things.

Lulu states - Our mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation building. I left the exhibition because it expressed the very opposite of this. It was immoral, offensive and going against nation-building.

i wander what kind of nation she is thinking of building if we cannot embrace peoples sexuality... a core issue of individual identity..

i really loved the feeling of julia rosa clarks solo show...
it lingered strongly on me as i left the gallery and for the rest of the day...

for those of you in cape town there is a walk about on the 06 and 13th.
her work explores our intricate and fraught relationship with Nature, the sensations and mysteries of chemistry, perception and color as they relate to the search for fulfillment through science, alchemy, theater-craft and art making...

read more about julia rosa clark and about this exhibition on the whatiftheworld gallerys website.

familia skateboards are on top of it ... with riders Adrian Day, Gavin Morgan, Clint van der Schyf, Mark Donaldson, Loucas Polydorou, Steph Morgan and Shaun Witherup they blend their top skills with an aesthetic that one can only know if one knows...
and for those that dont know... the bang chong video is my favorite skate videos of all time.
how it blends the emotions and feelings of the environments in amongst the tricks... as i think a large part of skating is about the streets.. the people.. the experiences and textures. quick moments gone but not forgotten...

there is never one side to a story... this documentary tells a strange and unsettling story about the notorious 32 battalion of south africa.. part of our twisted little history ..
watch it on youtube...

alright.. everybody knows that phrase... shell in nigeria...
like nike and sweatshops...
and it makes you close your ears and switch off because one feels so separated from the situation... but really were not separated from the situation and we are all responsible for what is happening in nigeria...
this documentary is really insightful and i highly recommend you take the time out to watch it... my thought for today...
also see the poison fire website...

im doing some research for a new artwork..
the congo has been notoriously exploited for its mineral resources, starting with king leopolds war for rubber the country has paid dearly for its richness in natural resources.
Rwanda, Uganda, Belgium and American companies have all struggled for profit through various destabilization campaigns over the years...

The surge of cellphone manufacturing has rocketed the need for the mineral coltan...
adding more blood to our hands as consumers due to the lack of responsibility taken by multi nationals... read more about it on this bbc news article...

these photos by Italian Francesco Giusti secured him second prize in the world press photo arts and entertainment category...
the photos are of the Societe des Ambianceurs et Personnes Elegantes
ie. the Society of Entertainers and Elegant People from the Congo Brazzaville.
forget new york, london and paris.... africas got the true style...

my favorite time in johannesburg was exploring this abandoned building.. i took lots of photos of the strange, aggressive and profoundly naive scribbles on the walls.

smelt the burnt rooms.. a history of what was there... smut and violence and overcrowded hunger im sure..

now vacant space... for the time being..
totally silent..

this silloette was the most calm moment that ive had in weeks..

my high anxiety calmed by the sheer silence of memory.

this is the wall from last week mission to johannesburg...
2days 26 cans of white and a beautiful abandoned building in market st, johanesburg.... yes please...

big up!

this is love and hates poster for the them and us project...
which brings together 20 European and 20 African visual artists, designers, illustrators and photographers. The project aims to explore the similarities and differences between first and third world views and aesthetics by pairing up artists from Europe with their African counterparts. see more of the artists involved and the works on http://them-and-us.org/

johannesburg inner city is nostalgic. gritted in stark memories. enormous empty high rise buildings silently speak of long nights in insecurity... the red ants have made their eviction marks - leaving only overcrowded scribbled poems on burnt bedroom walls...
allowing for the most surreal and beautiful smokey parties in the bottom floors of abandoned hotels with good friends. best early hours jumping into cold swimming pools under moonlight... we drove a taxi into a ditch. argued with taxi bosses in police stations... slept in soweto listening to tales of how it was to live there years ago from mxolis father... painted a six story building in two days... walked the mass of chinese stores of market street... climbed a 16 story empty building to get the sunrise... and painted under a bridge in newtown...
a cathedral of a home to about 60 of joburgs lost people... bedroom to the lowest economic spectrum of our society... now ive painted many areas that have left me startled but this place is just too much... joburg beer absorbed into the veins of the downtrodden children growing up with a reality so twisted... my heart was heavy from the energy there.... as we were leaving a guy with blood coming from his mouth is running from three men screaming. .. they trip him down kicking him .dragging him by his arm and leg up the gravel road... some kind of pole for hitting... my mind goes quite with noise.... today the lighting and thunder broke my heart by opening it up... there is no other city that speaks to me in this way... return home to cape town city of sun, segregation and sea with a hundred ideas and images beneath my skin.... beautiful...

joburg city....

...woodstock...

Oh shit... the African National Congress have just brought out this collection of leather jackets..... in true zuma style....er....
thats quite something .... gonna give the toyko rockabilly club some competition!

anyway dont miss out - get yourself one... on the anc webshop...

im lucky enough to have this painting on my lounge wall at home..
bruce mackay.. up and coming cape town artist... sharp*
check his flckr account..

... alles sal reg wees ...

kyk heir.. die andwoord is fokkin onbeskof! kyk heir hoe lyk it..

http://www.dieantwoord.com

taking over the interweb...

ah.. yes... THE B.R.O.T.H.E.R MOVEMENT... some fresh old school hip hop flavour from the UK... in protest to the apartheid regime... and some great old footage from SA.... what a gem.....

There is a prestigious hotel in cape town called the Mandela Rhodes place
Now it may be a totally innocent error on their part but in my opinion there is a problem with this association.
Mandela was a man who fought for black liberation...

But Rhodes on the other hand was not.
In the book the scramble for africa ive just read about how he...

-sent a team of pioneers to Matabeleland in 1880, tricking the Ndebele chief into signing away the lands full mineral rights, and then in 1893 funded the attack and slaughter of the Ndebele. Claiming the country as Rhodesia [todays Zimbabwe]. And forcing the Ndebele and shona tribes into becoming laborers through brute force and also through imposing a hut tax and confiscating their cattle.

- Rhodes also assisted Jan Hofmeyer in 1887 to change property qualification laws in the cape, which resulted in a quarter of the black and colored electorate to be disenfranchised of their land.

- He also paid off the media to make sure he received good press [ writers from the fortnightly review and the royal geographical society]

- And in Cecil Rhodess will he left all his vast fortune to "form a secret society composed of dedicated fanatics and modeled on the Jesuits. The true nature of this society was to be the extension of british rule through out the world. The perfecting of the system of emigration from the UK, especially into the whole of Africa, the holy land, crete, the whole of south America and the ultimate recovery of the USA as an integral part of the British empire"

There is also the Mandela Rhodes foundation.

The only thing I can think of that puts that links the two is the fact that Mandela bowed to the international powers by signing the sunset clause
Which in effect made it impossible for south Africa to achieve all the aims that were originally stated in the ANCs freedom charter.

"an uneducated people is easy to deceive..."
this quote from che guvera rings true when you look at south africas latest matric pass rate.. 60.2%....
its a dismal reflection on our education system and our governments lack of effort to educate the masses....
read about it in the mail and gaurdian...

oh... these pics are before and after pics of a classroom in delft i visited in the school holidays... a school where gangsterism is rife with stabbings happening in the school and a high pregnancy rate amongst the students.... aluta continua...

the before pic is by alexia webster...

here is an article rojer young on 'Umthombo' ...
a project thats getting street kids off sniffing glue and into surfing... really neat...*

photograph by justin mc gee...

im greatly pleased to see that blk jks have themselves a website up and running...

best you check it...

the love of violence and the violence of love...
two things that shape our humanity...
silly humans beautifully naive and innocent in our evils...
both creating and destroying ourselves with emotion....

im reading a thick and intensive book by thomas pakenham called, 'the scramble for africa'...
taking one through the europeans desperate scramble to divide and rape the continent of africa in the late 1800's... which the continent has never recovered from...
you can read a bit more about it on the new world encylopedia or order it on amazon.

i see there is also a new version by author john gahzvinian...

which i believe is a more recent look at the european powers [and of course china], and how they are effecting the continent in their search for cheap resources...
going to borrow that one from meghan as soon as i finish this first edition...

check out the gugulective's blog
it hasnt been updated in a while but they are still really active... doing some amazing work...
i met dhatini a while ago on a project we were both involved in and ive recently met some of the rest of the collective.. i think they are a much needed voice in cape town and south africa...
and am really excited to see whats in store in the future from them... hopefully we will do some things together in the next years.....

ive been absorbing my time with a book beautifully written by carolyn christov-bakargiev.
south african artists are priveledged to have such a man to learn from... his writings and works are enlightening, humbling, inspiring and devastating..
something of his that caught my eye... beautifully....
' I have never been able to escape johannesburg. The four houses i have lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of eachother. And in the end, all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and the films are certainly spawned by, and fed off, the brutalised society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art [and a politics] in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay'....

we are absolutely and utterly insignificant... nothing means anything... nothing means everything... everything is void... dark matter... thought is null... ambition is vanity... yet at the same time everything is essentially significant... each grain of sand and every hypothesis on human nature is valid... each emotion and life story is infinitely as powerful as the next... we are by definition contradictions.. holding the universe within and searching in the ever expanding external universe without for some validation of ourselves... we search in others for reflections of ourselves.... in countless ways we dig for meaning.... we step through ways to explore memory... project our futures... define definitions... find surety within the mysteries that ultimately are not for human comprehension... it is our limitations that make us beautiful... our downfalls that eventually give us character... it is the fall of the human race that allows for its resurrection in spirit.. and i speak not of religion... nor of belief... everything is believable but nothing is true... our knowledge is limited and to think otherwise is vanity... ive spent days lost in the absence of inspiration.... listening to silence... i want to hear the spaces between the moments... my art is nothing but a form of breathing... if we can be sailors on an epic search but know that the the ultimate end is water... that is all...

one would assume that skateboarding is not a crime... but alas in our sunny sea side town it is...

the cape town anti nuisance bylaw outlaws skateboarding

as well as begging...
climbing a tree.....
washing or cleaning a motor vehicle in a public space....
no person shall dry or hang washing in a public space.....
no person shall skate on roller skates or skate boards....
no trading goods without council permits...
if you are sitting, standing or lying in a public space and are asked to move by a officer you are then by law required to do so...

all of which are punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment..
its pretty obvious who these laws are aimed at and what there overall aim is...
to keep the city free from 'poor' people and unsightly 'nuisances'...
and keep the reality of the situation in our city outside the cbd and richer areas...
further entrenching our cities green zones and red zones...
my thought for the day...
my buddy was fined R500 for skating down loop st when it was totally empty on a sunday afternoon... im sure many vagrants and street people are constantly harrased and removed from the CBD and sea point... the city should belong to all of us...
are not public spaces by nature public...?

this ones been up for years... despite heavy cleaning some things slide ...

BLK JKS - MOLALATADI from Jamie-James Medina on Vimeo.

there may be some south africans awake enough to recognize a band of great importance and flavor... BLK JKS have opened their arms to the world and are getting the acknowledgment that they deserve... great new video... '
'molalatadi'
featured on the fader website...

zoros new video - azania...
loving it.. telling it as it is...

when i met spoek we were both so tragically and beautifully young and naive, sitting at the tattoo parlor where tyler was working... talking about putting together a hip hop zine... well this guy, this guy.... is a genius in his own right... was studying medicine at the age of 17 and opted for a life of music and mayhem instead....
some will know him as the ebony half of sweatx where he teams up with the amazing mr markus wormstorm....
but yes what im getting to is spoek's blog... now his blog is a cultural phenomena... i dont care what anyone sais... it kicks subjects from vervoed to kwaito to jesus to albinos and the zombie disco squad right up close and comfortably next to each other.. his notes from spice island take you on a fragrant tour of the thoughts and impressions of a post-apartheid post-hip hop posterboy...

jack parrows - 'cooler as eke'
video is out en dis bevok!!!!.....
*******************

i cannot leave out the legendary, and i mean legendary THEORY ONE from my blog posts...
hes been around for a time and though i hardly ever see him around i often see what hes been drawing late nights while the rest of the world is sleeping...

he is consistently amazing... i particularity love his hand done illustrations of street vagrants, gangsters and sailors....
pulling through with the illest style that is theory one and no other - see his flckr account...

yesterday was aids day....
my friend nkuli told me on the weekend that in her home town some people are actually getting aids on purpose so that they can receive the government grant of R800 a month... [thats about 100 dollars]
anyway.. this documentary called 'the origin of aids' is on freedocumentaries.org...
some interesting information... brilliant site...
you can stream it online or download it..
sharp sharp*

bas princen took this photo of mokkatam ridge in cairo, egypt...
there is a short write up from regine on the we make money not art site....

here is a show in new york that i will have some work in....
THE GENERATIONS
THE SHOWROOM GALLERY – NYC
3rd DECEMBER 2009
Cope2 presents a group show featuring taki 183, stayhigh149, comet, duster, serve, ban2, cap, henry chalfant, marka27, bates, swet, tloks, tko,klor, minone, cope2, delta2, os gemeos, scien, okuda, sen2, risk msk awr, ewok nyc, t-kid 170, queen andrea, indie 184, tilt, mist, krink, pulse, mark bode, faith 47, jamel shabazz, kacao 77, denz, reso, martha cooper

my first entry on this blog ever included a man called tyler b murphy...
well today we return to the subject and to Tyler B Murphy's sins of style tattoo parlor...
a place in cape town where you can feel at home and get a richly finished custom tattoo....
these boys dont fuck around.. view their portfolios of the three amigos.. mr tyler murphy, lee herbert and dave chaston on the sins of style website

photo by alexia webster...

Zanele Muholi's work explores female identity... female sexuality... presenting us with images strong and direct... were so oversaturated in stereotypes... these individuals invert the script for us and come as a breath of fresh air.. thank you...

the night of a thousand drawings is a great initiative to use art as a way to raise money for charities..
word of art pulled of the cape town leg of the event at the woodstock industrial center with great dedication...
alongside 4000 artworks the building was packed with good people, energy and great music...
the doodle battle was really quite something... with bison taking the winning place and my very own cashril plus coming second place...***** sharp sharp.....

see more pics of the event on word of arts website...

these are two works that i produced for the artmosh show in paris on the 26th of november...

'mama forgive your sinning daughter'
and
'what a woman wants god wants'
oil, silverleaf and graphite on wood with engraved veneer borders..

these are sisters born of russian prison tattoos, vengance love and nature...

so its just come as a surprise to me to see the notorious TOE007 on flickr...
most people dont know anything about the south african graffiti scene...
well if youd like to - a good point to start at it would be this guy- hitting it hard and consistently for the longest time... hardest spots and most dangerous train yards.. with undying motivation to do more more more... true graffiti artist ... much respect!

perhaps the wave of support for zuma is partially a sad cry of longing for the demands of the freedom charter... and the acknowledgment of how it was disregarded in the mbeki era... not to say that zuma would be able to bring it back to life... but the people know that their demands have been ignored...

hmmmmm...... so my friend micheal saal has done an interview... a very rare occurrence indeed ... and a beautiful thing to see... for those of you lucky enough to be reading this consider this your fortunate day for if you follow my link you will be inspired by this mysterious boy man creature who is incredibly talented in the art of art as well as thinking and living.... i love him muchly and he knows this i am sure...

see the interview on the goodness greatness blog

Baudouin Mouanda works as a photojournalist for several newspapers in Congo Brazzaville. Much of his work focuses on documenting urban Congo.
you can see a slide show of his work on this great photography site the blacksnapper

Koto Bolofo's first monograph documents a young talented South African sculptor forced to flee his rural home by building a full-sized, hand-built metal helicopter .... beautiful book and such beautiful pictures.. you can page through it here....

ive been hiding out in my studio cave for days and nights on end... and its making me into a bit of an internet geek... but something good came out of it... i stumbled across this website... the dead revolutionaries club....
they are refreshingly political and im liking the attitude very much... heating things up a little..... you should give it a read....im looking forward to seeing volume two....

and i quote:
"When we started thinking about this webzine there was a pervasive sense amongst a number of people that I was working with that there is a certain lie that is perpetuated in the art world and, that in our various interactions with that world, we were being asked to conspire with that lie.

The lie manifests itself in different forms. One of the forms that it takes is this idea that there is something inherently progressive about contemporary art. In the context of many Third World countries and South Africa (from where we speak) is no exception, what this often means is that the only way to stake a claim on the international art world is to commodify difference while professing progressive politics."

one of cape towns finest artists/illustrators in my opinion...
jordan metcalf previously known as sadmascot graces your eyes with a sadness and a stillness... a feeling of quite knowingness...
see his work on behance
and also flickr...

after the show in brussels inge wanted to rework the intro a bit... so here we go.. the final version of epitaph is loaded onto our vimeo account...

its different to the other two video.. i wanted to do something softer, exploring spaces lost... entering through sounds and revealing the echoes of empty rooms... finding love in flakes of paint, swollen curves and fragile lines... a story hidden in the flat colors broken apart by memories, dust, wood and steel... something like that.. we worked closely together on it.. it was an interesting and tough process and we learnt a few things on the way...

inge and rowan and both amazing artists and im humbled by their perspectives and intuition...

spent the day painting in langa with zola and a french boy seth... i knew i should have been at the studio dealing with some pressing work... but life is for living and we cannot spend to much time in doors... sharp....

there is just something about this place that gets under my skin...
into my veins... between my sentences... under my words..

i slept so deeply two nights ago i felt that i went to another universe completely... i was so tired and i could feel that sleep resonate in me the whole next day like i had died somehow...
im not sure if things are for a reason or if things are random and im not sure if chaos comes out of order or if order comes out of chaos... which is better... does it matter.... i am nihilistic and also dedicated... what a fucking mix.... 

this issue of the online voice magazine is pretty sick.. from the apartheid legacy to a full section on the fokofpolisiekar documentary... and i saw liam lynch in there somewhere too.... check check check it out...

the people at the constantia waldorf school are so polite....

in the ocean of noise i heard a voice...
i live in a city of sun and storms
below the beautiful mountains
swell waves of violence...
everything with in reasons...
in the city center the council scrapes and repaints street poles and traffic lights, cleans tags, chases away street kids and vagrants, plants trees and grass down the avenues keeping the city safe and sparkly for tourism.... so first world....
while a half hour drive will take you to crossroads an area lacking toilets
... lacking water.... lacking electricity....lacking
who here among us doesnt see this....
everything with in reasons
the world cup stadium in greenpoint could have been built in athlone....
wouldnt that have helped to address some of the geographical class problems in the city and allow for a flow of money into that non-white area.....
instead the billions of dollars flood into greenpoint...
look after the rich...
eat the rich....
hold fast cape town.....
hold fast....

inge beckmann from cape town.... beautiful and mysterious woman .....
wonder at her sounds....

we walked past the royal palace at night and my hair stood on end... made me think about the documentary white king, red rubber, black death... the extreme wealth in belguim was largely made through the sweat, blood and pillaging of the congo... the documentary needs to be seen by all...

last night we watched the pixies live...!! momentous occasion for me as much of my life has been to the soundtrack of frank black and many a destructively creative moment has been had to his ingenious lyrics... we then saw a gang of kids throwing bricks in the street at the pub owner... it strangely made me feel a twisted comfort of home... strange things... harlan lost his wallet and found his wallet and found a gold ring and the sun was out but the air was ice.. the local market is full of old stories and dusted objects... i will go back there tomorrow again just to see the layers of european history flake onto the stones... the epitaph show im doing through no new enemies is on saturday... brussels is beautiful and also not polished... kind of rough at the edges.. i discovered the genius russian artist called Vania Zouravliov .... i am in awe... i am homesick but i have much love for this moment now...

digging this illustration by Merwe Marchand Le Roux...
and i quote...
"heirdie stad is kak. elke nawek is die fokken selfde. so kan ons dak die venster en vokof see toe..."

so the artotale project is finished.... it was super busy, fun, hectic and humbling to meet such a grand list of artists....

Adam & Akay, Akim, Alex Diamond, Almut Linde, Ash, Ben Eine, Brad Downey, Boxi, Bronco, Daniel Man, Dave the Chimp, DTAGNO, Evol, Faith47, Flying Förtress, Herakut, Herbert Baglione, Jay-One, Loomit, Mirko Reisser (DAIM), Moki & 1010, Pius Portmann, SKKI, Swoon, Tilt, Trica, Tryone, Vitché & Jana, Zevs, Zezao, 56K.

you can see pictures of the event on just's site
the artotale website, and rik reinkings site....

off to brussels tomorrow to get ready for the epitaph show... rowan is still editing the actual video.... will let you know when the final results are uploaded to vimeo....... kay.. later..*

i was just directed to the blog of musa nxumalo and was looking at some of his work on line...
pretty inspiring honest work... so comforting it is to taste a little genuine old s.a flavor while traveling the european hinterlands...

ill be off to germany on wednesday for rik reinking's ARTotale project....

and then ill be going to brussels to do an art installation and video presentation at mr ego...
ill be presenting out third video piece called epitaph which ive been working on with rowan pybus and inge beckmann...

last night i went to the black heart gangs launch of 'the tale of how' book... beautifully presented and wonderful to hold to read and see the story unfold... see their website to order....

this is the trailer for a documentary about thomas sinkara....
i would like to see the full documentary... it looks full of devastating and also enlightening information about this man... a voice that needs to be heard.....
looks like you can order the documentary here....

look now who holds thee?

another pic from alexia webster from her ghana trip.. this is just too mad....

asha's show is solid... meticulously focused and beautiful.... so much time goes into each artwork... hes got his finger on the pulse of whats hot right now - mixing street with fine art... and his recipe works...
just to note- the works are all handpainted...
hes selling really well.. south africa needs to wake up to the fact that hes ahead of the pack ...
you can see the preview of his show 'macro soda text hits' on 34 long galleries webpage....

my good friend alexia webster took this most beautiful photo recently in ghana...
its a mural on the side of a residential house in a small side street
in the middle of Mamobi, a big maze like neighborhood or 'slum' in
Accra, Ghana...
you can see more of her work on her blogspot

this oil on wood triptych with laser engraved borders was destined for a show at the thinkspace gallery in los angeles... its lost at sea and may never return...
its titled 'the wheel of fortune' and fate has it that it is sadly lost in the corner of an unknown room in a disappeared space between africa and america for until who knows when... its been hard to say goodbye as i spent allot of love and time on it... may you rest in peace oh my wheel of fortune....

the black heart gang steal the show hands down.. this is the tale of how....
see their website....

ive never seen the calm before the storm see so nervous...

these two pics are from my 'home' series..
you can see the rest of the series on my website - under the wheatpaste section..... sharp sharp*

some days i pine for calm... other days i stretch out my violent love for time in condensed moments of anxious space...
maybe what happens in my absence is life and a reason that validates my breathing is
color and paint and emotion and i hope
that expressions and thoughts and feelings transferred by images may suffice
to untangle age and make concepts of beauty invisible except for their sound.
living in the south stapled to the heart of stone that is south africa.
hanging from my heart with ribbons are the images ive seen here.
my throat is scratched and my heart is heavy
and if only you knew...
what its like in your absence
my drawings are my hibernation with days and nights intermixed in excitement.
a lock down on a reason to live...
iron looks in hard ghetto spaces. suburban bliss meandering through ignorance... dream clouds moving over questions...
that we may live knowing songs of ageless parables until we get old.
for now. that is all.....

love and hate hail from pretoria but now reside in slaapstadt.... comprising of artists 351073 and black koki...
they are doing some work on the street and allot of illustration and painting... i got my brother one of black koki's paintings for his birthday and ive got one of 351073's hungry dogs next my light switch which reminds me to see in the dark and look into daylight fearlessly....
they also work near me and i step into their studio for inspiration from time to time...

you can page through their flickr account. ill keep you posted when they next do any shows...okay....

this dark and intrepid man is a musical and artistic genius.... ive always been fascinated with his band the wild eyes.... as well as holding his illustration work in high regard...
his graphic novel can only be super fantastically beautiful and intricate ...

take a look at his website and see some of what is coming out from under the south africas stormy skies...

something we are all searching for
despite the fact that it found us long ago....

i was reading the book the bang bang club
on the roadtrip... its powerful and strong and sad and devastating and made me think about how when i was alive when some of this was going down... i keep thinking as i read... i was alive then... sharing time with these stories...

its the story of four south african photographers Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter, and Ken Oosterbroek who banded together during the most violent times in our countries history to document the real and hard reality that most people would have preferred to ignore... it gives one perspective into the violent history of our country... and is a very personal account of the ethical and emotional struggles that war photographers have to deal with...
you can view some of the bang bang club's photos here...
and an audio slide show on the new york times site

.... im thinking parkjams in devon valley favela... cows and horses reigning free in the valleys of the transkei...missions into falling huts.. raining windswept beaches in the morning...lost... searching... finding...some idea of home...

every time...*******

mmmm..... were on our way to the transkei...

the sweetest and wisest artist in my life when all else fails cashril+ is there...
take a look at his latest comic launch at word of art

here is the link to the cashril+ website

see the pics of the launch and the link to the comic illustrations
and his animation

every bit of it.....

one of my pet hates is seeing these trucks that pack workers in like cattle...
sometimes on the back of a bakkie there are so many guys squeezed in that you cant believe some dont fall off...
is this a legacy of apartheid where the rights of the labor force are so insignificant...
where some peoples comfort are worth so much less then others....
lets never forget what this country is built on... the sweat and hardship of many exploited men.... aluta continua

thursday i saw a guy knocked over in the street. friday my boyfriend and i broke up. my heart... then i somehow came across a cow being sacrificed, the crowning of a new xhosa king in the western cape. so amazing and meticulous are the men who disect the cow. the heart removed. my heart soothed. anscestoral connections. i have none. but am humbled by this strong culture. watched the blk jks. walked up the mountain with them. slept on a hill in the sunlight. found a print of wild horses at night. this is in front of my bed now. to calm the hollow feeling in the morning... watched mr devious documentary last night and also billy the kid...
life is a myriad of pain and love and somewhere inbetween there must be a reason for this wheel of fortune moving so fast so endlessly...

fly on the wall have just brought out the fokofpolisiekar documentary which was excellent... and i still love this circular painting video they put together about a year ago... you can see more of their work on their website

settle down settle down... street art is not just a trendy fix... its an expression of ones environment and experiences... its not about fame and fashion... its about communication... these photos are taken by Tim Hetherington look under the war graffiti section and weep for this beautiful sad world.....

my good friend motel 7 is an artist of sad inverted fairy tales....castles and weeping childhoods. skulls and candyfloss.... were really sad to lose her in cape town as shes moved over to europe.... but her work needs to fly...for sure- here is her new website....
http://www.motelseven.com/
feast your eyes and your inner twisted child......*******

nice time kids..... ugly americans... hard livings.... NTK...UA...HL....CPT hosh.... it makes me home... sick....

yes.... it is... a penis rocket.....

there are many ideas going around about why we are alive... this one i found in joburg some time ago... a good and simple analogy... more palatable and conceivable then any heavan and hell philoshophy... my sunday night thoughts... are meandering into the darkness of sleep... more later...x

you know my favorite artist is cashril+
his comic launch is tomorrow night... were organizing a small intimate event... im very excited... ill post some images from the show soon.....

chalk on cement.... sadness on hope... chills in shadows... hunger under bridges... disenfranchised with no blankets... what is wrong south africa... what is wrong africa... what is wrong planet earth....

Kudzanai Chiurai is a young revolutionary Zimbabwean pop-artist who lives in South Africa.
Ive been following his work for some time...
Last week Kudzi opened his first show in Cape Town at the Goodman Gallery.
Entitled Dying to Be Men, Kudzi’s striking mixed media works are politically charged and carry with them a certain energy from the streets...
Heres is a link to some of his work from the show and his last project yellow lines...

the woodstock blues.....

my friend breeze sent me an email ... 'please send me the pics you took of me with the cow heads from when we painted johannesburg taxi ranks last year.... ', he asked...
so looking through my backup files i found them and thought id share one with you as well...
memoirs from sunday painting sessions on hot summer days... bright red walls amongst outdoor meat hacking taxi ranks....
the inner city of joburg - nothing quite like it i thought.....

a good friend of mine mike saal draws in dreams... i love his work....
here is his site...

south africa is indeed a complex place .... die antwoord is evidence of this...
this music video.... is... duidelik.... the part at the end where waddy dances makes ...me .. laugh.. so hard... but i suspect you may have to be south african to completley understand why... check out their myspace
....and check out this bevokde music video vannie kaap van suip...

possibly one of the most unpublished scenes in the graffiti world... but one of the toughest..... all respect to the train writers of south africa! dodging bullets, gangsters, security gaurds with guns and on the look out for copper cable theives... heres a short glimpse into some of the damage that cant be undone...

my absolute and definite favorite artist in the universe is cashril plus....
this is the piece he did at searle st for his eleventh birthday day... on his own... yip..... sharp sharp....

but it aint....

louis minaar is an artist that hails from pretoria, south africa... his show - 'originale' was held at salon91 last week. see the write up and pics from the show by ernst alex and here is a link to two of his videos - one on youtube
and his picturebook experiment video on facebook

ive developed a fascination with this certain style of painting...ive seen it in cape town and durban... harbour towns.. the stowaways from boats that travel from north and central africa, to south africa and then to europe leave these messages.
its a very undocumented and harsh journey that they go through and the places that you find their work is under railway bridges and hidden shelters... like them elusive and hard to find

when you have a border line weird fascination with walls like i do you notice all kinds of strange happenings on their surface....
for instance this old micro throwup in observatory, cape town, was sadly capped a few years back and has faded beautifully into the wall over time...
on top of this - really neatly in a shiny gold paint these words have been carefully painted out... its been there for ages and brings certain unexplainable enjoyment to my day everytime i pass it...

south africans in london... escaping the dusty time that can slow you down if your not vigilant.... mr warren lewis is a super artist from cape town - now in london... his new blog
behind the scenes connects you to his exploration of london town.... i especially love this skateboard graveyard...

same day prophet...
please explain the lack of...
we rest
less
then we used to
ive lost hope but i have love
im not sure which means more...

when i saw Araminta de Clermont's exhibition a while back at the Joao Ferreira Gallery in cape town it took away my breath....
growing up in cape town one learns to read gang tags and ive developed a dark fascination towards the tattoos that prisons nurture... with a built in fear but also a certain amount of sadness at the knowledge that people have to go through such hard experiences and wear them on the outside for all to see till the end of their days...
this bbc clip gives you a short glimpse into the work...

I love this image by Greg Marinovich. Painted by 54-year-old veteran activist, sam makgoka aka bra bricks mokolo. He was an activist in the ‘Eighties.
The Apartheid state rewarded him with two years in police detention and left him for dead in the veld at the side of the road. He now runs a self-help recycling project in Orange Farm and is still at the forefront of grassroots civic activism in the Vaal area.
there is an interesting article about him on gregs blog and theres also an article by Alec Russell worth checking out...

aha....stormy wednesday evening greetings...
with a prayer to the good and a sacrifice for the bad.... and for all inbetween a picture from my heart land... a place where sacrifice and prayer get mixed up, blur and intertwine....
on the left is one of my most favorite people on the entire planet, tattoo artist mr tyler b. murphy who i will tell you more about later....
and to the right is my prayer for the sacrifice...

For many months she seemed to stay awake longer than I do. I'd start checking my mails in the morning and there would be a new mural, a video, an unedited poem waiting from Faith47. When it started, I figured South African must be in a different time zone. Today I know it isn't. Sharing bits of her daily life, Faith offered some glasses to check out the same same but different all around me.

Her messages always have a strong impact on my day, and now you can see if they smack you in the same tender way as Modart welcomes Faith47 as our latest online contributor.

Technical competence and strongly voiced social concerns, the languages Faith47 brings forward are telling and committed. She's been one of our favorite artists to watch and correspond with over the past few years and we hope this link brings more people to a space where they might be affected by her energy.

-H Beagle (tail wagging big time)

check: Faith47.com