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Robert Slingsby HOME / PAINTING / SCULPTURE / INSTALLATIONS / EDITORIAL / BIOGRAPHY / CONTACT / ON EXHIBITION
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Robert Slingsby comes from an old Yorkshire family renowned for its
involvement with the world famous Slingsby glider which dates back to pre Second
World War aviation. Perhaps Robert inherited this physic energy which led him on
a path that eventually gave him the universal fame for his paintings which he
now enjoys. There is nothing more inspiring than flying in an engineless aeroplane
with only the whistle of the wind breaking up the pure silence known only by
eagles and gliders slicing through the atmosphere chasing thermals for lift. For
some reason artists and writers who are involved with flight become greatly
inspired and perhaps Robert inherited this abstract appreciation of flight in
his DNA. Robert started painting and collecting things from the age of three and
has never looked back. Now internationally accepted as a great artist he has
reached fifty an age when every artist takes a step backwards and takes a good
hard look of what went before and what might be for the future. I had the honour
of meeting Robert during his exhibition at the Square 1 Gallery and for an hour
I listened to his fascinating ideas for the creative role of the artist.
“I don’t think art and expressing oneself is a choice. If you have a
choice you wouldn’t do it although once you have embarked on the holy grail of
the artist if there is a choice factor involved, then the choice is not to make
it easy. The choice is to be stimulated by life. The choice is to be a thinking
human being. I don’t want to get stuck in an old paradigm; I don’t want to
be someone subservient to any one or regime that might elect themselves to make
the rules according to the ego of the individual. I want to be someone who
expands his consciousness as much as he can whilst I am on this planet.
I do that and I find it is selfish but so be it. I believe that for me as
an artist and painter this is perhaps the necessary way forward. Now at fifty I
am entering a chapter where I feel that I must adopt a lighter attitude towards
aspects of my life although this doesn’t mean I have to spend less time in my
studio…..”
Appropriate words with which Robert Slingsby gave a vision of his serious
role as an internationally acclaimed South African painter who started his life
with a philosophy and perspective that differed from the South African
Establishment. He found apartheid a monstrous and horrific nightmare but due to
the repression of the prevalent political regime he was only able to express his
disapproval through politically didactic paintings. Any overheard conversations
that denigrated apartheid was likely to put the speaker in prison and in the
fifties the police had eyes and ears everywhere. This ethnic fascism was a style
of politics which Robert abhorred and as soon as he could he left South Africa
to take up residence in Holland where he stayed for many years.
Robert is not only an artist but an artist who has certain humanitarian
qualities that extend far beyond the requirements of an ordinary painter. But
then real artists have two responsibilities and Robert is a real artist. The
first is for the expression of their art form and the second (related to the
first) is a comment on the society in which he lives via his personal technique,
paint brush chisel or whatever. Artists who use words as their form of censure
have a comparatively easy format. More
difficult is the comment via the paint brush or chisel. Before Robert left South Africa he matured as a human being and like the
true artist, reacted to the dark days of the seventies until in 1976, the
streets of Cape Town reverberated with the mob noise created by the education
riots. This was the catalyst that decided Robert to leave his native land and in
1977 he left South Africa to study at the Vrije Akademie in Den Haag Holland.
There he developed as a painter in oils producing a more classical style of
pictures with images easily recognised as distinct from the abstract techniques
of the latter half of the twentieth century.
After Holland he returned to post apartheid Africa and lived among the
people who were the victims of this iniquitous political structure. He learned
of their deserved but denied humanity by becoming part of their sub culture when
he visited the blacks in their own environment and shanty town homes. He began
to understand their tragedy and their past by walking the deserts and studying
their thrown away detritus which Robert found during his “walkabouts” in the
sands of “Table Bay” and the desert lands close to their places of work. It
was this detritus which gave Robert the inspiration for remarkable exhibition
which filled the walls at the Square 1 Gallery Chelsea.
Efficiently organised by Sandie Lowry, the Square 1 Gallery is a
relatively new, stylish, elegant and fashionable gallery at the Fulham end of
the Kings Road where Robert made an indelible impression and a powerful
statement about the dark days of South African apartheid and the heartless use
of what was basically slave labour and the employment of human beings as animals
and beasts of burden for which they were paid just enough for basic existence
survival. Whereas the ordinary
member of the establishment waited for the abolishment of apartheid before
adopting the now fashionable politically correct modern status quo attitude of
South Africa. Robert Slingsby
was a pathfinder for a minority which, with the help of Nelson Mandela, was to
grow into a large majority of people whose sense of humanity raised strong
objections to an iniquitous way of life that some white settlers fought to
maintain. Robert’s incredible
creations hanging on the walls at the Square1 Gallery were a powerful,
retrospective statement of the evil of apartheid and the kind of life the blacks
were condemned to. He used ordinary
artefacts and detritus which had been abandoned since the early days of
industrial apartheid and thrown away by the black workers from the diamond mines
and other industries where they worked more like prisoners in a chain gang than
people with the rights of a human being. Many years later Robert had wandered
these lands and found them buried and hidden in the sands of South Africa. He
took them home and added them to his collection and finally converted them to an
art form with intrinsic beauty. At first glance, without being told, one simply does not recognise what
Robert has used to make up his creation but, on closer inspection, it suddenly
dawns upon one that they are an eclectic selection of jugs, bowls, cans,
utensils, all of which once had a use and were the owned by the black workers
who had suffered so much. There was even an ancient (40 years plus) stolen money
box, (with indications that it had been forced opened) a string instrument
constructed out of a large tin with attachments for the strings, a bike carrier
still with some of its original wire and many other things which could be
recognised only with difficulty as the original object when first manufactured.
As well as such commonplace objects there were constructions made out of brass
and representing the shanty town shacks and even a small village which had
candles fired inside, glowing with a life of their own. Whatever Robert Slingsby
created he transformed them by what can only be described as magical
transmogrification of the true artist. He took the discarded artefacts and
detritus of apartheid and made them via acrylic on canvas or mixed media into a
magic that few people can create. Copyright Dorian van Braam. The
Renaissance Press March / April 2006. |
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UPDATED 6th September 2012 |