Darling artist takes up brush and paint against war

ARTIST, COMPOSER, WRITER

Darling artist takes up brush and paint against war

HERMAN LATEGAN visits artist Nicolaas Maritz in his eclectic museum in the Western Cape town and talks to him about his new exhibition in which paintings and soundscapes combine to depict his response to the wars currently raging in the world.

CELESTE THERON
CELESTE THERON

WHEN you drive into the town of Darling, 75 km from Cape Town, it looks like a dull, rural affair – with all due respect to the residents. But there are highlights – the town is known for its wildflowers, dairy farms, wine, one of the first wind farms in South Africa, Evita's Platform run by Pieter-Dirk Uys, and of course, the Maritz Museum.

After a quick sandwich that leaves the taste buds unmoved, we head to the museum. It is so hot that the day's colour is like dry and faded Polaroid photos. However, in the Maritz Museum it is as if you have stepped from a dull and almost cruel reality into the merry-go-round of a large kaleidoscope.

Ripe and rich colours – red, yellow, brown, green, purple, ochre – in hand-woven rugs, bunches of coquettish flowers; every room everywhere rustles with art, antique furniture, precious crockery. The red reminds me of a poem by Ina Rousseau:

What poet's thoughts
dwell here dark red on white
against
thin paper
printed in dragon blood?

(Watter digter se gedagtes
staan hier donkerrooi op wit
teen dun papier
in draakbloed afgedruk?)

To one side there is a skull, where life and death hold hands, there are the symbolic danger and allure of toy snakes, old slates that remind me of my grandmother's foyer, dumb masks, gaudy curtains and a perky ornamental rooster with red claws that might crow at any moment.


Lees hierdie artikel in Afrikaans


It feels like the soundtrack to this fusion of beauty and tradition should be Turkish. Nicolaas has a stately calm about him, he is the sultan of an Ottoman harem full of sleazy possibilities, with art as mistresses and lovers.

In his work he plays a Rorschach type of game with the spectator – one moment you see the humour, the next you are pulled through a maze into something darker. It is like a sea of amoebae where colour, symbol and idea move loosely and freely.

The creations vary from cats to tidal pools, nude studies to urban panoramas, still lifes, Namibian landscapes, trees and the old Transvaal – too many to name. At 65, Nicolaas is on the Everest of everything he's undertaken, from paintings and drawings to prints. He is the author and illustrator of several children's books such as Cape Town Kitty Cat and How Many Frogs Can You See?

 

In addition to exponent of visual arts and writing, Nicolaas is a musician and composer. The two mediums perform a dance together in his work. He explores musical themes similar to those in his visual art (listen below). But when I question it, he sighs. He clearly has no patience with stupidity.

I've attended many weird exhibitions, one where naked women danced on stilettos to the rhythm of croaking frogs, also where a man got himself circumcised in a gallery as part of a rite of passage, but not of music engaging in a long-arm dance with art. Sorry!

“When I paint, I usually work in layers," he says. “With sound too, and with software like GarageBand, it's become possible to metaphorically paint with sound, layer upon layer, and to create sound paintings, as I prefer to call them." (GarageBand is a software app with a full sound library that includes instruments such as guitar, trumpet and percussion.)

He talks about his current exhibition, Glimpsing the Hornet’s Nest: If you scan a QR code next to the painting you can listen to atmospheric music that complements it. These are abstract works of art created in response to the violence in the Middle East which is wont to flare up elsewhere.

There are four pieces that represent the Jewish Wailing Wall. Cyclic brutality is reflected and there are echoes of the chronicles of Cain and Abel, with primal themes such as jealousy and sin, moral failings, justice and mercy. (Sorry readers, but the description of artworks has its own esoteric lexicon, soldier on.)

“An immediate ceasefire [in the Mideast] is a necessary start, but will it usher in a new era of mistrust, fear and retaliation? Or could it open the door to reconciliation, albeit with an uncertain future?” asks Nicolaas in his brochure.

“The works do not attempt to provide answers," he says, “but rather offer a glimpse of the aftermath. Through broken compositions and symbols of destruction, the artworks depict damaged landscapes – scenes of shattered concrete, scorched debris and the remains of a once coherent whole. These pieces, fragmentary yet poignant, bear witness to the landscape's wounds, and capture both the horror of destruction and the latent potential for renewal."

***

After I have attended the exhibition, we meet again in Mouille Point, where we can continue talking over a plate of food. He orders chicken livers, I order garlic snails, and there is white wine. The sea smells nice.

Interviewing artists is not always easy, their heads work differently. There may be incomplete answers, or silences, which could mean you have asked a silly question.

Fortunately, I'd met Nicolaas decades ago at a house concert in Darling. I can read him, or can't I? Don't know.

At this jollification Amanda Strydom sang, Trix Pienaar told jokes and Evita Bezuidenhout joked about politics. There he was too, and the next day I went to his old house, which is now the museum. He has since moved to another residence in Darling.

Nicolaas does not have airs and graces and he says what he thinks. Once after I had written an article about him and his museum for a glossy magazine, he told me in a very deadpan that it was “crap". No matter, it's part of his charm.

***

Nicolaas Maritz was born in 1959 in Pretoria. His parents are Nic and Sarie, and he has three sisters. His father first studied agriculture but, like his mother, became an architect. Nicolaas, therefore, grew up in a home where the visual and creative flourished.

In Pretoria the 1960s was a time of prosperity. “It was a fantastic place," says Nicolaas. “The best place, it was cosmopolitan, all the embassies, and a whole generation of Germans who had left Germany. It was the little Brazil of its time, the architecture was modernist."

Their social life was filled with artists – and on his mother's side of the family were doctors, scientists and teachers. On Sundays they had barbecues and he remembers the conviviality, the smell of the fire and jugs of Tassies and Kellerprinz, iconic (that word is on its last legs, but it works here) staple wine of the time.

Food plays a big part in creating joyful memories. What does he remember about his mother's food?

“She cooked from Elizabeth David's books," he says. (David was a British actress and food writer who livened up bland British food with Mediterranean cuisine. Her recipes were based on ingredients such as eggplant, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which were rare in Britain at the time.)

Later they moved to Port Elizabeth where his parents taught architecture at the new university. Here he discovered the glory of tidal pools and the sea which would later figure in some of his works. He took art classes at school and held his first exhibition in his matric year already.

I ask how this was possible. “No man, I was precocious and arrogant."

Sitting across from him, I can imagine him as a small whirlpool, certainly not lazy like a snake's shadow. Speaking of snakes, slightly off-topic, he mentions that his neighbour in Darling is causing a ruckus because snakes are slithering from his yard to the neighbour's.

“The snakes are apparently going to bite him and his child and he calls them my snakes. I don't own snakes, they lie under bushes in my garden. How can they be my snakes? I've lived in Darling for over 30 years, no one has ever been bitten by a snake," he says. “Except for the amateur snake catcher, he's been bitten."

After school, he joined the army, where he did his national service as a chef. When he enrolled at the Michaelis art school in Cape Town, he did not yet know that the army was going to turn out to have been more fun.

“They thought I was a spy," he says. Probably because he was Afrikaans, but either way, he is not looking back longingly to his time there.

His life took several turns after this. He taught at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, worked for an advertising company, and in between travelled to London to broaden his horizons.

It was the time of Boy George and Margaret Thatcher. In the words of Charles Dickens: “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.”

Here he learnt self-confidence, that it was possible to express himself and that creativity was the opposite of depression. Back in the Cape, he started working on various exhibitions. His friend, the artist Hylton Nel, told him he was going to move to the countryside. You can still buy a house in cash and work there undisturbed.

One day Nicolaas was visiting a friend in Darling and noticed that a church was for sale and shortly afterwards he moved in. He had a kitchen and bathroom installed and his bedroom was in the choir upstairs.

Later he moved to a house, because the church was too cramped. Over the three decades that Nicolaas has lived in the little Darling, he has not hidden his brilliance under a pail, he's let it shine – and quite a bit in this very pointless, rural affair.

For his latest exhibition in the Maritz Museum, Nicolaas offers a guided tour of Glimpsing the Hornet’s Nest. It takes place on Saturday, January 18 (tomorrow) from 11:30 to 12:30. The address is 5 Nemesia Street, Darling. Cell: 078 419 7093. Email: bignick098@gmail.com. The exhibition runs until the end of January.

***

On other days call him to make an appointment, and he will meet you there. If you scan the QR code next to a work of art with your mobile phone, a soundscape is played that creates a type of emotional soundtrack. Listen to the music that accompanies the artworks:


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