TEXT SAMPLES

 Robyn Cook Born in Johannesburg. Lives in Overport. Florian Furst cites growing up with a very distant family and a lack of emotional closeness as important influences on his artistic expression. Spending much of his time alone, he says that his “lack of social skills” allowed him the freedom to portray a sense of true self with no danger of persecution or judgement from others. Furst works in a bakery during the day and says that he loves the contrast between the mundaneness of his job and what he gets up to in the artistic realm. “I may clean breadcrumbs to pay the bills, but by night I can be anything from a hunted fawn to a raging tornado”. Arts, says Furst, is all around us and not confined to a studio or easel. He rejects the notion of influences and is currently expressing himself as a performance artist. His body is his medium and the environment he occupies is his canvas. Bhekinkosi Gumbi Born in Nongoma in 1971. Lives in Nongoma. Bhekinkosi Gumbi started drawing when he was 12. From there, he began to look at pictures of carved objects and developed a love of carving spoons. And that, he says, is “where it all began.” Now he works full-time for himself and enjoys his job because of the pleasure that other people derive from his work. Gumbi is completely self-taught and works from home. He describes his vocation as “a gift” and sees each piece he makes as telling the story of its creation, as well as commenting on history and the present. Working in wood which he cuts from the veld, Gumbi's talents have grown over the years and he has started to exhibit his work formally. He currently sells his work in Newcastle and to the African Art Centre in Durban. Gumbi plans to form a progressive sculptors' organization and has ambitions of achieving internationally recognition for his work. Robert Infanti Born in Scottburgh in 1959. Lives in Kloof. Robert Infanti grew up in a close-knit Italian family. He enjoyed painting as a child but it was only through an emotionally painful divorce many decades later that he started to express himself through painting, finding healing in visual expression. Infanti, who is a fan of Salvador Dali, works in oils and enjoys the unhurried nature of the medium. He experiments with the blending of natural materials with oils and likes to use rich colours that make striking statements. Says Infanti, “I feel that my paintings represent certain stages of my life and that I have always tried to paint with my heart and my soul.” He is often inspired by pictures from books or magazines. He is drawn to images which tug at his heartstrings, with which is then able to grapple and produce his own interpretation. Infanti has a love of African imagery and looks forward to working with other mediums in the future. Ashley Jewnarain Born 1985 in Durban. Lives in Durban. Ashley Jewnarain has a BTech in Fine Art and spends most of his spare time producing digital work at home on his PC or painting in the studio. As a teenager, his artistic skills were initially honed by emulating comic book artists and illustrators but, as he began to delve into art history and explore the contemporary landscape, he soon developed his own style and conceptual concerns. Jewnarain, who references Gerhard Richter and Louis de Courdier as influences, loves art for its depth and versatility as a language. “It is able to communicate concepts and ideas that transcend the frameworks of culture, politics and knowledge, and open our eyes to new perspectives on just about anything”. His loves enamel whose physicality and richness of hues delight him but his favourite and most intuitive medium is black ink on paper. He strives in his compositions to obtain a sense of motion or suspension, emphasising the effects of gravity on his canvases. Albina Stanislavovna Mitchell Born in Moscow in 1968. Lives in Durban. Albina Mitchell grew up in the Soviet Union, where art was represented very selectively and Western art was not part of the canon. Although she has been drawing all her life, it was only when she came to South Africa and found an encouraging social landscape that she realised that what she was doing could actually be considered art. Mitchell, who attends art classes with Pascale Chandler, loves the work of Vasiliy Kandinski and Willem Boschoff. She is most comfortable with oils, although she usually draws a complete image on paper first, as well as doing digital graphic work in preparation. Her prime artistic concern is the notion of interaction and the sense of intensity and unrest that is often engendered, whether it is in human activities or the interplay of clouds in the sky. For Mitchell, everything is interwoven; there are no true straight lines, no black and white. All things lead to all other things. Zama Mthiyane Born in Ladysmith. Lives in Durban. Zama Mthiyane is currently studying for her BTech at Durban University of Technology. Recently, she has started approaching her work from a more conceptual level, working with notions of memory and drawing on her own family memories as a starting point. Her work is concerned with both the fragility of memory and the way in which it is central in defining us and making us who we are. “Through memory”, says Mthiyane, “I find myself.” She references Terry Kurgan and Christian Boltanski as important influences who use interesting materials to explore concerns similar to her own. She works in both painting, where she favours acrylic, and in sculpture, where she combines weaving with welding and enjoys the resulting interplay of form and texture. She also finds much power in the use of found objects and abstract structures to contain meanings that are not always easy to decipher.