Whilst Africa is embracing all things Chinese – trade, infrastructure and ideas, here is a guaranteed conversation-starter for Africans visiting China.
Just ask about Liu Bolin, the ‘invisible’ Chinese artist whose exhibitions are touring the world – and wowing it.
Bolin has perfected the art of urban camouflage, painting himself from head to toe, blending himself into the background he is in so seamlessly that you will not notice him until he moves. The idea is to make a silent statement and prompt the question: what lies beneath our public realms?
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30208 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2-600x450.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Graffiti-in-Beijing-No.2.jpg 1023w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Bolin has exhibited his work in some of the world’s biggest galleries, triggering intrigue and introspection.
Born in China’s Shandong province, before becoming an artist, Bolin did the odd job as art teacher and assistant. It was not ideal.
“I lived at the bottom of society,” he says. “Those years, I felt redundant.”
That is when he often receded to the background, hiding. In October 2005, the Suojia Village International Art Camp in Beijing was demolished, “forcefully”, he tells us.
That was the starting point of Bolin’s celebrated Hiding In The City series, which began as a brand of ‘performance art’ that he is best known for.
“[The demolition] was a shock for me. I created the Hiding In The City series to express my protest. I try to use the series to express my inner world and my understanding of the world around me,” says Bolin.
The artistic process he uses is trompel’oeil (translated from French as ‘trick the eye’). In his work, there is no touching-up by a computer.
Every effect is painted on to his body, slowly, step by step, using it as a canvas to deliver a social message.
That is why his works are moving; he is the front and center of his art.
The Mandarin-speaking artist shares more details about his fascinating work in this interview:
Why do you do what you do?
Many people understand the meaning of my work and the power it has. My work spreads widely on the internet which indicates people know what I want to express. I think the most important thing [about] art is it [can] connect to people’s inner worlds.
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What statement are you making?
When I started the Hiding In The City series, I hid myself in the studio [that had] been demolished. That work represents my protest [against] urban demolition.
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Describe the work you have done around the world…
In the beginning, I had done work in France and Italy. I was disappearing in front of graffiti, bookshelves etc. I hid myself in various time [zones], languages, backgrounds and events. I thought different things happening at different times [can influence] the way humans think. At the same time, social problems such as the strikes in Paris, [poverty] in India, the financial crises and crash of the World Trade Center in New York, have all influenced my work.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-30207 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-198x300.jpg" alt="" width="198" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-198x300.jpg 198w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-300x455.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-600x909.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-768x1164.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1-676x1024.jpg 676w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Door-God-No.1.jpg 675w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px" />
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Which is your most recent work?
I had my solo show in Paris in March, and another solo show at a museum in Argentina in April. I recently did new work in Paris, influenced by the Charlie Hebdo shooting. I found 17 local people in Paris and made them disappear in order to question the problems in society. I thought this the modern version of religious war. I will participate in the Biennale of Performance Art in Argentina in June and also work on a new [art] influenced by transgenic food in Argentina.
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How does the government in China view your work?
To be frank, the government has never censored my work so far. My work has never gotten any support from anyone but no one has been against it [either]. I have been doing my work quite freely…A lot of people from around the world like what I do and have resonance with my work. This is what I cherish the most.
How much time does it take to prepare for each work and how much does each ‘performance’ cost?
The time [taken to] paint the body depends on the complexity of the background. Like the Supermarket, Magazine…such work needs a lot of time to grasp details. The longest I have taken is almost four days. Actually, it is really hard work. Generally speaking, for a simple background, a day is enough, especially outdoor scenes.
Actually, standing there, being painted on, is a painful process. For several hours, you cannot move, the body aches all over. However, I enjoy such a process which is a sacrifice to the art and a striving for my [artistic] dream. I have never calculated how much it costs for finishing each performance.
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What materials do you work with?
I’ve been using cloth designed for Chinese military men. Because in the beginning, I wanted to imitate how a sniper is hidden from his environment, by painting on his face, hands and body. For the paint, we usually use acrylic as it is simple.
How do you fund your work?
I have galleries who are in charge of the commercial part of my work.
What have you planned for the year ahead?
I will work on a new Target series in Italy and an art performance from the series Security Check. I plan [similar] performances next year in both Paris and New York. I would like to find famous buildings and invite people to be a part of it. Last year, there were many plane accidents. I would like people to pay more attention to matters of flight security.
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Do you have any plans to visit Africa?
African culture has always been my fascination. When I was in college, I specifically researched Africa’s traditional art. Unfortunately, I have never been to Africa, but I believe I will have a chance to visit it someday in the future. I really look forward to it.

Villa-dei-Misteri-Pompei

The Artist Who Resides In His Paintings

It wasn’t your ordinary art theft. Whoever stole South African artist Conor Mccreedy’s painting of Nelson Mandela had a strange way of doing it.
Mccreedy was on his way to fetch the painting from a vault in New York. As he entered the vault he noticed a four-foot hole in the ceiling. He thought it was strange considering the ceiling was one meter thick concrete. He guessed that the company must be doing maintenance on the building. He then found a broken lock. What he saw inside stunned him.
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“There in my storage room, in place of my painting, was a pile of original photographs of Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Mick Jagger from the sixties on the Hampton River… It was like a scene out of a movie.”
Mccreedy’s painting of Mandela, along with a sketchbook of 30 drawings, were gone. A few hours later, his storage room was ringed with yellow tape.
“We had the CIA, CSI, FBI and Interpol all there. It was the first time meeting Frank Shea, my private investigator; he literally could have walked out of a movie. Shea had this comb over and perfect hair, with a perfect red tie and a pinstripe suit complete with Mont Blanc pen, like Donnie Brasco or 007. Then I thought to myself this must be a joke,” he says.
It wasn’t. No one could answer the riddle of Lennon and Jagger either. It was June and at the time Mandela was sick. Mccreedy thought the heist had something to do with hate mail, most of it from South Africa, claiming his portrait was merely jumping on the band wagon.
“People were running me down, saying I was a con. It was sad. But every time I get a negative comment my art goes up in value. Why do it if you hate my art? If you hate my childlike blue splash? It took me 27 years to do that blue splash,” he says.
The next day; it got worse. At 6AM, New York time, Mccreedy’s insurance company phoned him. The painting was insured in Africa, not New York. The only thing to do was for Mccreedy to fly back to South Africa, knock on the door of the art collector who bought the painting and buy it back with an envelope containing R100,000 ($9,280).
“It wasn’t even my favorite piece. I did it in Europe in 2008… The painting was in my trademark MccreedyBlue on a A4 canvas board, but that was it,” he says.
The robbery made headlines around the world and the story was just beginning. Interpol, the international criminal police organization, declared the missing artwork was priceless; it gave Mccreedy a claim to be the only living artist to have a painting declared priceless.
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Almost a year later, clues are as elusive as the painting itself. The artist has found a way to recoup the loss. Mccreedy is now selling 46664 replica prints, the same as Mandela’s prison number, for $100 each. Five percent goes to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg.
It’s just one of the bizarre stops along the way for Mccreedy, who was born and bred in Johannesburg and making a name for himself in New York. At school he was a talented footballer whose trademark was scoring from corner kicks. There he had a chance meeting with Mandela that changed his life.
“When I was eleven I had the opportunity to meet Mandela personally. Out of a hall filled with 600 school boys he chose to speak to me. I’ll never forget it. He said to me ‘you have powerful eyes, use them’. Mandela and Picasso are my greatest inspirations,” Mccreedy says.
New York didn’t start well for Mccreedy. He was broke and dropped out of Art College when blind chance landed his first solo exhibition.
“I bought an old third-hand Iranian carpet at a store and I needed someone to help me move it. So we went to my studio, a four-flight walk up the stairs, and the man helping me comes up and sees all this art that I’m working on, adorned on my walls, and he’s like: ‘This stuff is crazy! You know what? You’ve got to meet someone.’”
The carpet carrier knew the curator at the National Arts Club, in Manhattan, just down the road. It resulted in Mccreedy’s first ever exhibition sold out two days before the opening. What’s more his former lecturers from art school, who had written him off, came to the opening and were impressed, Mccreedy says.
These days Mccreedy is no longer a struggling artist. His art is selling from Africa to Asia. On the morning of meeting FORBES AFRICA in March, he sold a painting for $33,000.
“Art is an investment and can bring in big business. Art auctions in South Africa sell for R450 million ($42 million) a year, but I’ve seen auctions in New York sell for that in one night. People haven’t realized the opportunities art can bring,” he says.
Clearly Mccreedy has.

The Case Of  The Missing Mandela

Some may mistake Brett Murray’s self-titled book of art as a course in realpolitik, and The Spear – his work that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma standing like Lenin, from the Victor Ivanov poster, while his genitals dangle from the open zipper of his trousers. It triggered a defamation lawsuit by the ruling African National Congress and was defaced in May 2012, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Yet the book that chronicles his artworks over a career of 30 years is more than that. It is an interesting study about Murray’s catalogue as satire and political comment, where political factions spark racial divide as the rule, not the exception. This beautifully put-together book treats The Spear debacle as one pinnacle in a prolific career that is, at times, touching and melancholic. It tells the story of a non-conformist, who has been creating controversy since the get go.
Murray’s pop art is elegant and austere: simple form, bold color, in steel, sculpture and mixed media. Each work is an attack on neo-tribalism, tokenism, apartheid, cronyism and pretentiousness. Over the years, some critics have thought his attacks somewhat simple-minded, but most agree his work is classic in its own way. Murray’s art is peculiar, it touches on the tragedy and absurdity of our past and present, but at its core it grapples with South Africa’s failure to communicate its humane emptiness.
A lot of art nowadays is incoherent and meaningless; audiences are not required to connect, and it leaves the observer contemptuous and superior, as though they were watching a television advert – with a sense that they are being sold to. Murray’s pieces are old-school, virtuoso triumphs that work on a primitive notion that his issues are all surface and physical – a la his 2000 sculpture titled Africa, with its African statuette and several Bart Simpson faces stuck to its body. Is it about tradition selling out to commercialism? Afrocentrism buckling to Westernism? A clash of cultures? The analysis goes on.
Many present day artworks do not make one think, instead it is decorative and beautiful to look at. Art is meant to challenge, to make one feel a part of something again, not just as though one is lost in another city. Good art makes one care about how the country is faring, and makes one believe in collective possibility once again. I guess Murray understands that. He creates exhibitions that speak to its audience. It is not that we want all his work to be high art, it can be low art too – like his Heritage Collection with its steel animals and African curio feel – and still feel like high art.
What makes Murray timeless are his themes – his art can access the modern youth because he knows what touches them. The recurrence of themes in Murray’s work illustrates that each generation wants satire, just addressed in newer ways. Murray fulfils this need, but with each new artwork, he pushes the boundaries a little further – have we become that desensitized? Was The Spear a step too far? When South Africa was a young democracy, it enjoyed any art that laid bare its diversity. As the country’s democracy has become more nuanced, complicated, and tricky, it is harder to be straightforward.
There was a lot of talk about The Spear this time last year that our tastes and habits had changed, moved on from Murray’s kind of art. But that is preposterous. Part of the purpose of art is to open up debate. The artist’s job is to give a glimpse of what is really going on below the surface. Murray does that with a simple angle: subversive gesture. His book reflects that modus operandi. It also makes it clear that his straight-shooting style will never go out of fashion, because it never loses sight of its primary reason: it is not intended to be solemn, but smart, inventive and deliberately absurd. That makes for good art.

Another Sharp Spear Point From Murray

In May, Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold for $120 million becoming the most expensive painting to be sold at auction. A week later, Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow sold for nearly $87 million. Irma Stern’s Two Arabs sold for R21 million ($2.5 million) last year, the highest price for a painting sold at auction in South Africa. Eleven of the 20 highest prices fetched at auction in the world and nine of the 10 highest prices in South Africa have occurred since 2008.
The near-collapse of the global economy didn’t stop the market reaching its highs. Wealthy collectors remain wealthy. And top-quality items appreciate even in poorer market contexts. Fine art auction house, Strauss &amp; Co, reported a boom in 2010 with a turnover of R187 million ($22.3 million) and a strong market for 2011 making only slightly less at R170 million ($20.2 million).
Despite hammer prices being up, masterpieces are out of the price range of many collectors and dealers. The high end of the market is one part of the story, it’s the segment that appeals to the popular imagination, and to those of us who are so insanely disconnected from the real world that we continue to hope that one day, we too may be able to buy a Malevich or a Twombly.
“The run-of-the-mill part of the market is in a sorry state,” says fine art expert and auctioneer, Stephan Welz.
“At this end of the market, dealers have in the past bought a large percentage of works as stock-in-trade to sell to the average salaried person who wants one or two nice pieces on the mantelpiece.”
It would be silly not to admit we’ve been affected. Those works least affected are those with rarity value; anything decorative has been devastated,” adds Mark Read, director of the Everard Read gallery.
<div id="attachment_927" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-927" class="size-large wp-image-927" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/artauctionauctioneer-1024x755.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="349" />Steven Wlz at the Strauss and Co auction</div>
Given then that the Old Masters and historic paintings are too expensive for most collectors and dealers and, of course, there are fewer of them, dealers both abroad and locally have turned to contemporary artists, which are normally fragile in the secondary market and a highly speculative sector.
For the last two years, contemporary works have topped auction sales at Christie’s—an international company offering art auctions and private sales to clients. In South Africa, artists like Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Walter Battiss and Erik Laubscher are fetching good prices as the market broadens. But there are no guarantees of a handsome profit, even if you’ve studied past performance prices, says Welz, and those are less available for contemporary than older works. Some wonder, too, about the staying power of this market compared to those works time has already validated.
Markets, of course, depend not only on buyers, but also on sellers.
“When the market isn’t favorable, sellers are reluctant to sell, and they’re usually in a position to choose their market,” says Welz.
What’s more, sellers don’t know where else to invest their money since opportunities are currently few—stock markets are down, rates on savings accounts are low and interest is taxed, even gold has been volatile.
A conversation between Sotheby’s chair of contemporary art for Europe, Cheyenne Westphal and an anonymous American collector as reported in the Wall Street Journal serves to illustrate the point: “I phoned him up and told him, ‘Do you realize that in the present market, we can get you $50 million for your Rothko?’ There was a very long silence on the other end of the phone. Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, Ms Westphal, that sure is tremendous news. But what the hell would I do with $50 million in the bank?’”
To try to predict prices and understand trends, we turn to the market intelligence provided by public auctions (auctions are fairly transparent compared to private sales, prices are published and annual reports are available) and historical price indexes. But, even armed with these prognostications, one feels uneasy in generalizing across the market.
Part of the reason that trying to draw any conclusions about the health of the art market is so difficult is because that very term is a misnomer. A number of small markets combine to form the art market and while Old Masters are selling, demand for contemporary or modern art pieces may be declining; buyers supporting the fine arts market are not the same people who are buying decorative art.
The Wall Street Journal last month quoted Christie’s international as saying its art business had proved resilient and that a growing population of super-wealthy collectors were sustaining demand for top works. “We have not seen the global economy affect our business,” said Steven Murphy, Christie’s CE. The Mei Moses All Art Index, which measures art market returns by tracking the sale and resale of major art works, mainly in New York and London, claimed an 11% return for investors in 2011, outpacing stock market returns for a second consecutive year. But the problem is that not all art performs equally and most art never gains enough value to be represented at the kind of auction that index compilers track—it’s an incomplete picture. So studies like these fail to provide any proof that art is a solid investment generally.
Some economists explain the market’s relative buoyancy, saying fine art isn’t part of the global economy. Rather, they say, it is part of the booming economy of a set of super-super rich individuals or ‘Ultra High Net Worth Individuals’ who are just growing richer. For these people, and because a painting is singular and no one else can own it, an astronomically expensive work does an almost unparalleled job of saying just how wealthy and cultivated they are.
Let me illustrate what I mean. As I stood in front of the Stern on auction, Arab, I felt a little let down. It was small (66,5 x 65,5cm) and it was beautifully painted, the frame hand-carved, but I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘How can it possibly be worth R9 million [R17 million ($2.0 million) as it turned out]’, and that’s the thing, it isn’t, it signals that you’re spending money, squandering money even because what you’re buying can’t be worth that much. And it’s this fact, the fact that it isn’t a sensible way to make money that drives the trophy hunters.
But perhaps in comparing Arab to the value I would place on a house, I would be too narrowly defining an investment. Today, the value of an artwork is often determined by collectors for whom there is nothing more at stake than making money. Previously, critics and connoisseurs had some influence on which pieces were perceived to be good. “Today’s art market is by and large misinformed,” said veteran advisor Thea Westreich in the New York magazine. “People are using their ears, not their eyes, to select works, buying based on market trends rather than art-historical standards.”
The critic, Clement Greenberg, was right when he said of culture and its place in the economy of life, “a poor life is lived by anyone who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze… without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at…” He also said, “there are, of course, more important things than art, life itself, what actually happens to you”.
Overseas, the art market is huge and growing—there is a new class of people buying art. But in South Africa, the market is incredibly small, says Stefan Hundt of Sanlam Private Investments’ art advisory service. “If we have 5,000 serious buyers, it’s a lot,” and adds it’s for this reason that an art fund wouldn’t survive.
If the economy continues to stagnate, Welz and Read anticipate tough times to come. Even if it starts to grow, since the art economy lags behind the normal economy by about a year, it will be some time before private collectors and corporates have any disposable income to invest in art.
Let art be first a pleasure, the prevailing wisdom goes, then an asset. That way, the quality verdicts of the public, which make it a capricious investment, won’t matter so much. As an asset market, says international-capital-markets expert Amir Shariat in the New York magazine, “art remains non-transparent, overly prone to taste and fashions, and extremely illiquid. People forget that illiquid doesn’t mean ‘low price’. It means ‘no price’.”
Perhaps art isn’t even an investment or perhaps it’s an investment of a different nature. There’s an intangible pleasure in owning a painting and, unlike stocks, art doesn’t earn dividends and it costs to keep—you have to look after it, make sure it doesn’t deteriorate and insure it and then there are steep transaction costs. Unlike other investments, the art object is unique, “detached from the sanity of a cause” in Samuel Beckett’s words (though less so when we look at overpriced contemporary works like Damien Hirst’s, which are made with the sale in mind). In being inexplicable, to take Beckett’s reasoning to its conclusion, art objects may be a source of enchantment, and in following the trading of these in the financial arena, emptied for a moment of the wonder they can inspire in quieter moments, we can forget that.

The Art of Art

It’s a painting so recognizably Hodgins, this ambiguous portrait of power—the oversized suit; the patterns; the Matisse-ish blocks of bright color on the face; the thin moustache, its shape echoed in the shoestring tie; the festive bunting against an otherwise plain background. The portrait, A Gentleman from Mexico, is coming up for auction in Johannesburg this month. Sales estimates are as high as R600,000 ($76,600) .
When I think of Robert Hodgins, I think of the line from TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “There will be time, there will be time, to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” because it prefaces the wonderful book simply titled Robert Hodgins; because he was 63 when he started painting seriously; because I called him about a year before he died—I wanted to do a video interview with him and he complained that his face was too wrinkled and nobody would want to look at it; because I’d met him at an exhibition and knew his face (he was wearing, I think, black-and-white striped trousers, he looked spry); and because the faces in his paintings are so often disguised, or only broadly suggested—they are brutish, they speak of baseness, they are ape-like, distorted, grotesque.
Hodgins captured something real in his paintings; a bit like Francis Bacon, but not the same: tortured but funny and sad too, something real about the world and about our particular Garden of Earthly Delights.
It’s how I’d buy and how first-time buyers are advised to buy: buy what you like, then if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter; you’ll experience the intangible joy of owning an artwork to look at, to think about. But I’ll not be bidding at the next auction—the pace is too fast, the pressure too great. I’ll be merely watching the collectors, the experts, the investors—those who’ve been studying price histories as an indication of both how much to pay and how much to expect in future—auction databases are particularly useful for this, some going back as far as 1652.
Part of the anticipation around A Gentleman from Mexico is linked to the records Strauss &amp; Co has lately set for a Hodgins: starting with his A Seated Figure, Red Room that sold for R356,480 in May 2011; followed by Greenpiece ’99 No 3 (A Godson of the Godfather) selling for R612,700 in September 2011; and culminating in Igor Stravinsky &amp; Four Women that sold for R724,100 ($87,785) in February.
According to the fine art auctioneer’s managing director, Stephan Welz, the auction is likely to raise between R30 and R40 million ($3.6-5.1 million). Irma Stern’s Arab could fetch as much as R9 million ($1.15 million). Strauss &amp; Co sold Stern’s Two Arabs for R21,166,000 ($2.7 million) last year, the highest price achieved for any painting at auction in South Africa. Out of a total of 305 works on offer, 280 will be local, Alfred Thoba’s 1976 Riots among them.
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The auction takes place on Monday, June 11 at the Johannesburg Country Club in Woodmead.

Five Million Dollars  At The Drop Of A Hammer

Who would have thought that a New York removal man would help turn a budding young artist into a history maker? Well, that’s exactly what happened to South African Conor McCreedy.
A helping hand moving a carpet up to his apartment helped land McCreedy his first solo exhibition, at the National Arts Club jsut down the road—the youngest artist to do so.
“I bought an old third-hand carpet from Iran at an old vintage store and I needed someone to help me move it. So we went to my studio, a four-flight walk up the stairs, and he comes up and sees all this art that I’m working on, adorned on my walls, and he’s like: ‘Holy shit, man, this stuff is crazy! You know what? You’ve got to meet someone.’”
McCreedy moved to New York knowing no one, and having spent most of his youth between a secluded boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal and his home in the gated Melrose suburb of Johannesburg. The last thing the 2005 Hilton College alumnus, with a distinction in art, thought was that this removal man would introduce him to the president of New York’s historic NAC.
The art club, located in the Tilden Mansion in Gramercy Park New York, was founded in 1898. It has an exclusive invitation-only membership, which included three former United States presidents:  Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It also included some of the country’s most important artists and art patrons, such as Andy Warhol.
“I went to boarding school. I know you should never assume, but I did assume. I thought someone who is a mover is not really going to help someone in the art world. I was at a young, tender age and was a bit ignorant.
“He said: ‘You need to go to the NAC—the president of the club is waiting for you.’ So I was like, ‘What is that?’ and he said, ‘Yo, you big dummy, it’s across the street from you—it’s the most historic club in America.’”
It led to an introduction with Alden Jones Junior, NAC president. This meeting saw a solo exhibition for McCreedy, titled Outliers, in 2010.
“That really opened up doors for me; it kind of put me on the map and allowed the world to know who I was and what I was doing. It really helped a lot.”
McCreedy has moved away from styles that made his name, painting abstract animals and portraits, to creating more abstract images with his own style, painting in blues on fine linen.
“You don’t have to paint zebras and giraffes to paint Africa. South African art in New York is quite a niche market. It’s still African art, although some is being created here and some in New York. It is where I feel my proper outlet is now. You finally find your niche; mine is now in blues. Big giant pigments on Belgian linen, French linen and the finest linen you can find, and it’s this big explosion of an ocean. We live in a volatile world, so when you create these oceans, people get lost in this beautiful array of blues. And they like that because it’s kind of like what the ocean does to you.”
His change in style is not only tied to his artistic growth, but also his African roots. With an awareness of the continent’s image among many in the Western world, McCreedy wants his work to change perceptions about Africa and African art.
“I’m trying to get the Western world to understand that Africa is not as bad or poverty stricken as the world sees it. India is way worse, and the poverty in India is so bad, yet they have better investments and the right type of investments going into India, which we do not have.
“We have Bill Gates, who is sending all these mosquito nets into, let us say Malawi, for instance, which is great. But it is not the right investment because what he is doing is putting the guy in Malawi, who is making the mosquito nets right out of business, because you can’t beat something that is for free.
“And we have these advertisements; you see them all over [the world], like ‘Incredible India’—you never see ‘Astonishing Africa’ or ‘Amazing Africa’, you don’t see that.”
Conor McCreedy hopes to change all of this with his blue brush strokes.

Tag: Painting

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Artist Who Resides In His Paintings

The Case Of The Missing Mandela

Another Sharp Spear Point From Murray

The Art of Art

Five Million Dollars At The Drop Of A Hammer

Restyling Africa’s Image One Brush Stroke At A Time