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| The Early Pioneer Artists of South Africa | |||||
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Gladys
Mgudlandlu ( 1925 - 1979 ) |
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| 13 April 2001 by Andries Loots | |||||
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Gladys was
born in 1925 in the district of Peddie in the Eastern Cape. She went to school in Port Elizabeth and in 1940 obtained her Teachers Diploma at
the Lovedale College near Alice. She wrote her own stories and folktales
which she also illustrated. In 1944 she moved to the Cape Town
township of Gugulethu. Gladys was one of the first black woman
artists to exhibit her work in public.
Gladys was mostly a self-taught artist with a natural talent and always took pride in what others had to say about her art. Fellow artists Majorie Wallace, Gregoire Boonzaier and Katherine Harries all contributed in guiding Gladys in various small but vital technical aspects. She had a natural talent for uninhibited use of colour and unusual perspective ( high focal point ), a spontaneous simplicity of technique and style. In 1960 she exhibited her paintings in Cape Town and became a celebrity overnight. Despite various misfortunes in her life the inner need to full-fill her creativity always drove her back to her art and it was not for public recognition, but purely working for her own enjoyment. She enjoyed painting at night by the light of a paraffin lamp at her kitchen table. Cape Town artist, Peter Clarke, recalls this as he visited the artist on occasion and saw the lamp standing on a pile of finished paintings. Many of her early works were done in pen, charcoal and ink and subsequently in gouache and watercolours. She then progressed to working in oil on glazed canvasses. Her style is naive and nearly childlike in the way she depicts scenes from her daily surroundings. Her work sometimes incorporate the folktales told to her by her grandmother. Traditional scenes of women collecting and carrying firewood are typical themes. Whatever she painted was always spontaneous and from the heart. Gladys was once described as "The Black Irma Stern of South Africa " by fellow artist and mentor Gregoire Boonzaier |
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Exhibitions :
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Images of Man, Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists, Fort Hare University Press, E.J. De Jager, ISBN. 1-86810-015-4 Land and
Lives, The story of early black artists, Human &
Rossouw, Elza Miles, ISBN 0798136588 |
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