There’s something fascinating about the relationship between artists and the small towns in which they were born or spent time in before establishing their careers elsewhere.
Think of Olive Schreiner and her creaky childhood home in Cradock, surrounded by the koppies, or the misty forests of Hogsback, birthplace of Tolkien. Did the open grasslands of Schweizer-Reneke have any influence on Irma Stern’s paintings? Was Sol Plaatje’s way of seeing and making sense of the world shaped, in part, by his upbringing in the small mission station Pniel? And what did the mountainous Karoo town of KwaNojoli give to Walter Battiss?
On Paulet Street, which sits at the foot of KwaNojoli’s great, green mountain, is the Walter Battiss Art Museum. It was opened by the artist himself, shortly before his death in 1982. Back then, the town went by Somerset East, and the building itself had been a hotel run by Battiss’s parents. It’s also where he spent some of his formative childhood years before leaving to study, travelling the world, and eventually settling in Pretoria, where he worked as an artist and teacher until his death.
I haven’t come here to trace the early history of the artist. I’m staying in the house next door. I’m meant to be writing, with the five other authors on the Jakes Gerwel residency, but I’m restless and curious about this unassuming building that houses the work of one of the country’s best-known artists. So, on my second day, I wander in.
“You’re David Mann,” someone from inside the museum calls out as I’m closing the heavy wrought-iron gate behind me. “You write about art.” Ros Turner, who works as the town’s tourism officer, emerges. She makes a point, she says, of looking up all of the visiting writers, as they almost always end up at the museum. Turner has been in the area for decades, after moving here from Australia with her husband. She works out of the museum, and has come to serve as its guide, too.
She ushers me in and sits me down in front of the television where a short documentary about the life and work of Battiss is queued up. It’s a surprisingly detailed portrait of an artist as prolific and multifaceted as him. All of the major themes and influences are there — the rock art, the interest in folklore and archaeology, the childlike lines of Picasso and the lively shapes and colours of Matisse.
Interviews with the artist also convey his characteristic playfulness and penchant for constructing whole fictive worlds, with their own currencies, residents, and national flags. This is an artist who won an Olympic medal for art (back when they still did such a thing at the Olympics), who declared himself the king of a make-believe world and raised a flag outside his home as if to prove it.
He venerated the human form as much as he did the natural landscape, always deconstructing and refiguring, never concerned with fitting in with the European and American styles that dominated the industry at the time, but remaining curious about them, nonetheless. He was also a complex character, who carefully curated the version of himself he chose to present to the world.
“I’m not interested in making art about pain or sadness or negativity,” says Battiss in the documentary. “I have great respect for those artists who are able to do that, but I only like making art about happy things.”
Certainly, there is an undeniable joy to his work. Of the many pieces on display in the museum — prints, watercolours, drawings, acrylic and oil paintings — almost all of them are characterised by vibrant colour, and spirited gestures and forms. Even his provisional works, the white paint on black paper, or the pencil sketches, have a gleeful choreography to them.
Among the wide range of works in the museum are a few of Battiss’s personal affects, each one helping us get a little closer to the truth of the person behind the persona. There is a small, hand-bound book of poems he wrote to his sister as a young boy, each one accompanied by a drawing.
They are not good poems, but many of them show how the landscape held his imagination — “The veld’s as old as love.” And there is the family Bible, a formidable, leather-bound tome that might hold something of a clue as to his ambiguous relationship with his own identity which, through so much of his work, anecdotes, and relationships, points to a free-spirited approach to sexuality, gender, spirituality and more.
Battiss grew up in a strict English Methodist family, in a small town where the church loomed large. It’s not difficult, then, to take what is probably his best-known quote — “I invented myself” — as both a declaration and a means of making better sense of oneself in a world that dealt in absolutes.
I spend the rest of the week walking the town, trying to better understand it. I visit the history museum, the old church, the only pub in town, the only coffee shop in town. I chat with street vendors and shop owners, get familiar with the stray dogs, pigs and herds of cows that roam the streets. Most people walk everywhere. Everyone greets when they pass. Lone white horses stand and graze in the mist, like a scene from a David Lynch film, or a Santu Mofokeng photograph.
Beyond the small town idyll, there is clear disparity. The town has a disproportionate amount of bottle stores, and residents regularly queue outside them from the early morning. The town’s white minority mostly occupy the town itself, while the black and coloured majority live outside town, travelling in each day for work. This is not a unique reality in South Africa, but in towns like this, it’s a reality that sits closer to the surface, and serves as something of a microcosm for the greater country. Many of these dynamics would have been in place when Battiss was here as a child, yet none of it features in his work. Again, what did KwaNojoli lend his practice, exactly?
There are the overt influences, like the particular colour palette of his watercolours — the earthy browns, the shrubby green and chartreuse of the landscape — and there is the strange fiction of the Karoo. While the Karoo is a far cry from Battiss’ archipelago nation of Fook Island, it’s not difficult to see these early ways of configuring narrative, of inventing fantastical worlds and fables, in KwaNojoli. The forested mountain backdrop, its hiking trails, cave systems, and winding rivers all lend themselves to exploration, storytelling, and play.
In our second week in KwaNojoli, a few of us take a trip out to a waterfall just outside town. It’s the same waterfall featured in the documentary on Battiss, and he speaks about it fondly. Apparently, it’s one of the last sites he wanted to visit before his death. Too weak to do the hike himself, he had to be assisted — by Ros Turner’s husband, I’m told — through the winding paths and rocky riverbeds. I think about this as we make our way down into the valley, following the river towards the waterfall.
At the base of the waterfall, shrouded in the natural amphitheatre of the mountain, I sit and look for black eagles, unintentionally echoing his “Boy With Bird” print. I think about the quote of his that sits in the museum: “My father was a waterfall, my mother was a butterfly” — strength and beauty, the weight of gravity and the lightness of being. The valley is full of butterflies. Baboons and bushpigs, too. We hear them barking and moving through the forest all afternoon. Another Battiss line comes to mind: “Our generation is slowly being cut off from nature. We don’t take our inspiration from it. The magic of birds in full flight, for example, which we only see now in our dreams.”
True to form, Battiss never referenced the more unpleasant things lurking in the mountains, like the fat ticks that cling to your clothing, and the hundreds of golden orb spiders, which have a habit of weaving their glistening webs across the trail at perfect eye-level. Only the happy things. It is perhaps with this same attitude that he regarded KwaNojoli.
On my final day in the town, I stop by the museum one last time. I scan the black and white images on the walls, searching again for some defining moment in his early childhood that can be linked to his work. Nothing stands out. Instead, on the journey back home to Johannesburg, I find what I’m looking for in my phone’s camera roll — a collection of Battiss artworks alongside pictures and videos of the mountain, the flat expanse of the Karoo, the dramatic sweep of the waterfall and the river that runs silently alongside the town.
“To understand his art, one has to understand the Karoo and his love for it,” urges the documentary. Battiss’s work, like the artist himself, is complex and multitudinous, less a linear progression of form, style and thematics than a collage of memories, images and experiences. This is what the Karoo and KwaNojoli gave to Battiss, an enduring love of place, and the freedom to play.
Wanted
