Imagining the surreal world of David Lynch: Johann Louw at home in Piketberg.
Imagining the surreal world of David Lynch: Johann Louw at home in Piketberg.
Who is he? One of the most significant artists in South Africa, Johann Louw is one of the ‘Voëlvry generasie’ of young, alternative Afrikaans artists from Stellenbosch and Pretoria. As a painter, he was initially drawn to German Neo-Expressionism, and the influence of Lucian Freud can be seen in his paintings of people with their sallow tones and brooding unease. He exhibits regularly at international Biennales, and his preoccupation with barren grey spaces and skulls, masks and dead animals looks back to the French for still-life studies as natures mortes. All around his house, you stumble across simple things – like the skulls and the bones and odd pieces of broken objects – that find their way into his work. These things literally lie around him.
Johann Louw’s decision to live in Piketberg, out in the Swartland an hour or so from Cape Town, was purely practical. Not wanting to bring up their two children in Woodstock where they lived, he and his partner, the painter Clare Menck, drew a circle around Cape Town and found this empty 1890s house which, about 15 years ago, only cost R130 000. His studio used to be upstairs, in the loft, but when that became impractical he decamped to a shed on a nearby farm. The house was empty when they arrived and not in great repair – not that they’ve done much to it since. ‘It needs a new roof but I’m not going to do it,’ Louw says. ‘I’ll never get round to it. I won’t get round to it.’ There were two huge trees in the garden. Lots of planting happened, and the dam-like swimming pool was built – a huge attraction for the children when they visit at the weekend from Menck’s Morreesburg home.
Clearly it was so very much a hand-built house; not a cement house but a clay brick house that’s simply built. He finds that this gives the house ‘a certain intimacy, which makes it friendly, not like a cement brick or a modern house which you have to conquer to make it into your own. This house is softer somehow. It’s there already.’ And, like the handmade Sandveld chairs Louw collects, its finish is uneven. There are no 90-degree angles anywhere in its construction. If there’s a connection between the appeal of the house’s physicality and its textures, and the act of painting and its attendant physical form, it’s that sense of touch. Stefan Hundt (in the catalogue published to coincide with the exhibition ‘Johann Louw: New Paintings’ at SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, in 2010), says that ‘Johann’s obsession is with the materiality of his medium: oil paint. The paint being the glutinous and fluid substance that is moulded and ‘‘heaved’’ along the canvas over and over again, reshaping, obliterating and forming.’ If this is what makes his paintings so engaging, it’s also what gives this visceral old house its appeal. Curiously, the essence of this place is hidden. An eery stillness pervades every corner of every room, Louw himself just a shadow that moves silently about the place, getting on with his life.
‘My lifestyle is probably mainly unconventional in the sense that there is no conventional routine to it. It depends what conventional is. I might come and make myself some eggs in the kitchen. Then I walk to the computer room and I sit in front of the computer eating my eggs, doing whatever. I go out into the garden and I water the stuff that needs to be watered and I go to my bedroom and lie on the bed and I read. I get up when I want to, and I go to bed when I want to. I don’t want to be phoned before 11 in the morning but I’m awake from nine. If I worked late then I might only wake at 10. I get up, make coffee, sit in the garden drinking it and that’s it. I try to go into my studio every day. Work isn’t only just painting, it’s also sitting and thinking. Having said that, one can decide on one’s own routine. It’s good to get to the studio every day at some point nonetheless. Even if you just sit there. I suppose you need routine to give structure to your day.’
There’s an unkemptness to this house, a chaos, on which Louw seems to thrive. The backyard is filled with broken furniture, but he has his braai here. The attic is heaped with discarded books, children’s toys, furniture and TVs, and it houses his precious collection of Sandveld chairs.
‘The sitting room is filled mostly with things I’ve just picked up.’ There are also artworks by Kenneth St Clair, Conrad Botes, Cobus van Bosch, Brett Murray – people he knows, mostly. Some are swaps, others are gifts. Occasionally they were bought. ‘Mostly not,’ says Louw.
The dressing table in the bedroom is heaped with bits and pieces found and collected. ‘I’m not naturally a tidy person.’
(Above, the study; below, the hall corridor): there’s anonymity to Louw’s house, and an eerie silence surrounds it. The anima seems to have been sucked out of the objects in it. Their essence is gone. This is a characteristic of Louw’s paintings of human beings, their apparent solidity of flesh at odds with the vacated persona.
In the penumbra of this shuttered homestead, shafts of sunlight reveal a collection of country furniture.
A silent, tidy bedroom awaits the weekly visit of Louw’s children from their mother’s home in nearby Morreesburg.
At the heart of a rambling garden is the pool Louw built for his children.
In Louw’s hillside studio, finished works are propped around the walls. Here, from left, Gary-Halflyf met Fragment (2012) and the diptych Groot Willem, Liggend (2007).
A brooding sky over Piketberg in the Swartland in autumn. The intensity of the landscape is a motif in Louw’s depictions of a disorientated, featureless space.
In his workspace, the artist is surrounded by a mix of new and old works. Louw’s studio is a large shed on a hillside behind his house. ‘I come here every day at some point, even if it is just to sit.’