Van Wyk Retrospective Looks to the Future
At the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN), veteran artist Andrew van Wyk says he’s “getting old” and a younger artist, who has hurried to greet him, banishes the idea with a laugh.
At 62, Van Wyk is still full of life, work and new ideas, and the sight of the celebrated artist, in from his farm near Rehoboth, is a rare treat.
In the city to join the launch of the Bank Windhoek Triennial, Van Wyk, a previous winner, attends to extend his support to the initiative.
Fittingly, the event takes place amid Van Wyk’s exhibition titled ‘Art Through the Eye of An Artist’.
Across three rooms of the NAGN’s lower gallery, the artist’s layered, complex and sometimes surreal worlds beckon from frames that seem to strain to constrain Van Wyk’s evocative visions.
Presenting echoes of alien encounters, visualisations of parallel worlds and glimpses of dreamlike planets, Van Wyk contrasts these fantastic scenes with the everyday beauty of Namibian culture and the struggles of Namibia’s people rendered in prints and paintings.
The selection on display dates back to the early 90s and is pulled from the NAGN’s permanent and heritage collections as well as from Van Wyk’s private store.
‘Art Through The Eye of An Artist’ is also the first showing of Van Wyk’s new technique which uses semi-precious rocks as its raw material.
In a room off the main gallery, patrons are invited to witness the artist’s new method under the cover of dark. Small flashlights rest beside each work and as one illuminates the piece, so begins a subtle sparkle.
The glittering mimics the twinkle of excitement that animates Van Wyk’s eyes when he speaks about his newest exploration.
Though many may know Van Wyk as a visual artist, an educator and the founder of Rehoboth School of Arts, fewer people can imagine him as a twenty-year old prospector searching for gold in the Hardap region and in the Khomas Hochland.
“I’ve been in the prospecting world for more than 40 years, even during the colonial times. I was planning to open a gold mine, but I was blocked everywhere,” says Van Wyk.
Andrew van Wyk with his family and National Art Gallery of Namibia staff members.
“So, I decided: ‘Man, I am an artist, I’m going to do something else.’ I use platinum group metals and gold powders in my artworks. Not every person in the world will find the colours that I have found over more than forty years,” he says.
“My process is a water process. This is the first type of this art that is hanging inside the National Art Gallery of Namibia because no artist in the world has ever thought of this new technique.”
In an artwork featuring his new method and called ‘Who are we! Where do we come from! Where are we going to!’, Van Wyk poses the kind of existential question that recurs in his work and continues in his motif of eyes, which also appear in the exhibition’s title.
“The human being’s eye is your microscope. Through my microscope over the years, I have created art. Every artist creates art through their microscope,” says Van Wyk.
“But many of us are blind in life. We don’t see, then when something happens, we think: ‘Jinne, but I’m walking open-eyed, why didn’t I ever see that?’. The eye is a blessing and through the eye we become creative people.”
Employing the eye as exhibition title, design and as an invitation to look deeper, Van Wyk’s eyes peer from his artworks and ask questions while imploring the viewer to see beyond the physical world and into its parallels, into the artist’s dreams and into the future.
“I’m a dreamer and I’m a seer. I can see things before they even happen,” says Van Wyk of his more narrative, dreamlike and fantastical imagery.
Warning of the next rains and the folly of looking for paradise beyond that which is all around us, Van Wyk also expands on the recurring images of music in his work.
In paintings such as ‘African Rhythm’, ‘The Life of Africa’ and ‘African Rhythms on Another Planet’, Van Wyk creates vivid scenes of dancing and drumming by moonlight, ballet by the sea and a party on another world.
“I play music. I play guitar.
I play harmonica. My children play music. I teach them,” says Van Wyk. “My whole family are musicians. So, music is part of my life. We human beings are living in the rhythm of life.”
At 62, Van Wyk knows a lot about music and about life, but the artist doesn’t have any plans to retire.
“An artist must paint till he passes on,” says Van Wyk.
“You cannot stop halfway and say: No, I have a retrospective, enough is enough. An artist must never give up. If you give up, then why did you practise art? Just for fun? Only to be in the limelight?” asks Van Wyk.
“Being creative is an Almighty-given gift. It’s a wisdom. So, I keep on.”
The Artist Hunting
– Andrew van Wyk
Eager to carry on practising his new technique and determined to look only to the future, Van Wyk anticipates his later years with unwavering ambition.
“I have offloaded my 50 to 60-year-old problems. I’ve taken a very light bag, put it on my back and this includes only new visions,” says Van Wyk.
“If the Almighty allows me to get to the seventies and beyond, I will practise my new art technique because I have something to show the world.”
‘Art Through the Eye of An Artist’ will be on display at the National Art Gallery of Namibia until 14 June.
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com
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