On a late-winter morning, a fire was burning in Fred and Susan Scott’s Auckland Park home. We sat with coffee while my attention wandered across walls given over almost entirely to art, some framed in white wood on one wall and dark wood on others. Books lined shelves between the works, their spines forming their own careful composition among the frames. Among the works hung a photograph signed by Sergei Eisenstein, passed down from Fred’s grandfather.
The couple has spent decades building their collection together, shaped by years of looking, buying and living with art, so I arrived carrying the word “collector” like a key, assuming it would open the room. Sitting inside it, the word already felt too small.
Fred remembers a painting registering with him at three years old, in a childhood where artists were regular visitors to the family home and exhibitions were simply part of life. Collecting came later as a word for something that had already begun. Susan describes that accumulated way of looking as “a different form of reading”.
“Many people think: collector, lots of money,” Fred said. Susan refused the label altogether. “I don’t want a label; it’s not necessary.”
Artist, curator and educator Gordon Froud makes much the same case. As a schoolboy in Hillbrow, he bought drawings for R10 each from Riaan Burger, an artist he had come to know on the streets around the bookshop where he worked. At the time, R10 represented two hours behind the counter. Decades later, that trained eye let him recognise a Judith Mason drawing overlooked in a second-hand shop and buy it for R250.
When I asked Fred and Susan how somebody should approach buying their first artwork, the advice was practical. Look widely. Read. Speak to artists. If an artist catches your attention, look at more of their work. Return to a piece before buying. Ask the price.
Then Fred added something less easily turned into a tip. “The most important thing is the artist,” he said, arguing that in parts of the market that person has become “veiled”, kept from the buyer.
Susan pointed to initiatives such as Contra.Joburg, the art festival founded by entrepreneur Sara Hallatt, as a way of closing that distance. “She takes people to the studios,” she said.
The word people won’t wear
A collector I will call Thabang*, not his real name, did not grow up around art. In 2016 he wandered into Agog, then a gallery and wine bar in Maboneng. Its owners became friends. Through them, he found his way to August House and deeper into Johannesburg’s art world. He now owns about 20 works.
Ask if he is a collector and he pulls back. To Thabang, the word comes with assumptions of wealth that he does not recognise in himself. “I just have an appreciation for the arts, man.”
Several of the works he owns come from my own fine-art photography practice. He owns two photographs from my No More series, one in his office and another in his apartment. The first stayed with him for a year before he bought it. I had thought of that purchase as the beginning of the transaction. Listening to Thabang, I realised I had started the story too late. The photograph had entered his life long before he owned it.
Thabang buys pieces he “can’t stop thinking about”. Fred says a good artwork should never become boring. It should keep some mystery.
Zintle*, however, approaches the word differently. Her first purchase happened almost by accident after an artist arrived at a McDonald’s in town with several works. “I’d never thought of myself as a collector,” she told me. “It felt far-fetched, like something you take up when you’re bored and in your fifties.”
Then she bought one.
“Buying art is a bit like getting a tattoo. Once you have the first, you just want the next.”
Now a work has to be “resonant or provocative”. In some pieces, she recognises her own life or community. Others make people stop, look again and ask questions. If she does not know enough about an artist, she reads. A work by South African contemporary-mixed media artist Buqaqawuli Nobakada currently sits just outside what she can spend. For now.
Price, inevitably, remains part of the equation. Thabang once spent months negotiating instalments directly with artists and galleries. Africa Collect, a registered credit provider focused on supporting artists and collectors, offers another route by allowing buyers to finance works rather than negotiate payment terms themselves.
Photographer Benjamin Skinner has found a different way. Relationships built over time with other artists have allowed him to barter, trading work for work and gradually adding pieces he wants to live with to his own collection.
What follows the first work
Artist Azael Langa sees the relationship from the other side. Most of his clients buy repeatedly. He spends time with them, talks about where his work comes from and watches the relationship change. A first purchase may begin with aesthetics, but later people return knowing more of the artist behind the work and wanting to follow where the practice goes next.
Those relationships matter materially, too. Repeat sales support his family, fund travel and allow him to pay his own way into international exhibitions.
For Hallatt, creating more collectors begins with something simpler: habit. She talks about First Thursdays, Main Street Sundays and studio visits as occasions that put people around art often enough for looking to become familiar.
Main Street Sundays, championed by Jozi My Jozi, which also supports Contra.Joburg, is one example. It draws people back into Johannesburg’s inner city, where someone can arrive for an afternoon and encounter an artist without planning to.
Contra.Joburg Art Festival, which runs from August 29-30, takes that encounter through the studio doors.
Thabang once brought eight friends to August House. Two bought their first artworks that day. After one of Africa Collect’s visits to the Scotts’ home, Hallatt says another guest went to an art fair the following weekend and bought a work.
“All we’ve got to do is get people to start,” she says.
I think again about the year Thabang spent unable to stop thinking about No More before he bought it. He now has one in his office and another in his apartment. When we met, he told me he was considering a third, this time as a gift for a customer.
Back in Auckland Park, the walls had seemed full when I arrived. By the time I left, I understood the years beneath them. A child taken to exhibitions. Two hours’ wages spent on a drawing. A friendship begun in a wine bar. A photograph thought about for a year, bought twice, and perhaps soon carried into somebody else’s life.
Wanted
