Threads of connection

Many of us have chosen paintings to which we return, like pilgrims. For those fortunate enough to have travelled, they may be poised on the walls of museums, like ‘my’ Cranach in the National Gallery in London and ‘my’ Kiefer in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. These works remind me just how soul-feeding it is to look at a work in the flesh, with marks made by an artist. Call me odd: I sense strings of connection — call it energy if you like — between me and these works. They twine into my own story.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 – 1553)
Portrait of a woman
The National Gallery, London

Anselm Kiefer (1945 – )
Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

I have always imagined the rooms in artists’ heads to be the most fascinating spaces to visit. I visualise colours and passageways: enchanting, tangled, ordered, shadowed, sunny, frightening… When I stand in front of a work, I imagine a thread drawn through time back towards these rooms; rooms which are the hotbeds and meditation chambers which lead to the webs of clues I see hanging about artists’ studios, to their works. Surely the studio, a revered and intimate creative space, which I am always honoured to visit, is a mere fragmentary peep into an artist’s brain-rooms?

Why make art? And then, more art? What’s the fuel that connects the studio story with the journey of a painting or drawing once it leaves there? What about the energy each object trails onward?

Sometimes my own story reels back to me and I get a glimpse of the onward trail travelled by a picture. Certainly, if you collect art, you are acutely aware that your own story ‘hooks’ works, which have particular resonance with you.

In 2009 I opened an exhibition for three artist friends at a gallery in the Cape. After previewing their exhibition to prepare my words of cheer and celebration, I rummaged through the mish-mash collectable section of this store of collectables. An unsigned charcoal, depicting a real event of which I was part, surprisingly flipped before me. The framer’s label proved that it had been in a Johannesburg collection at some point, this drawing depicting people swimming in a deep, sunlit pool below a gushing waterfall. What a flashback. 

After the opening, I was given the drawing as a token of thanks. How moved I was that the owners had noticed my emotional response to it. It still hangs in my bedroom, reminding me of the web of connections to the artists whose exhibition I launched that day, to the artist of the unsigned drawing and to the transformative time in my own life that the bathers represent.

I like the secret — that the owners of the gallery did not know that I was aware of whose drawing it was, of when it was made and of where. In an art-world so hungry for authentication the absence of the obvious signature made the discovery more meaningful.

Virginia MacKenny
Bathers (watercolour on paper)

Photo of the waterfall
c. 1987

And then, a few years later, with time gifted by Covid-19 lockdown, I opened an envelope of colour photo prints. The Pietermaritzburg postal stamp (remember those days!) is dated 1987 – that is before we had digital cameras. Onto my table dropped photographs of that very waterfall and pool, and a happy bunch of hikers threading their way along the Giant’s Cup Trail in the Drakensburg. Amongst them was Virginia MacKenny, who had sent me a watercolour of the bathers in that same pool for my birthday that year, and whose bathers drawing I had tumbled upon, by chance, in the collectables store.

And how strange that another painting from the same waterfall swim hangs on a friend’s wall in her home. It spoke to her too, and I was able to explain its origins…