FOREWORD

This autobiography relates to time and facts in a personal account while interwoven with the universal energy then and now.  Of necessity, I move backwards and forwards in time with unavoidable repetition. I hope that the picture that emerges regarding my innovative approach will not confuse, but act in a positive way and that the personal facts described will be seen as part of the tapestry of my life which provided a spur to my creativity and imagination in the complex world of today. I am both an artist and a social anthropologist.

I am known more for my atypical medium I call tapestry than as a painter internationally, and collected as such. Initially, however, I was recognized in a small place called Bulawayo [in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe] for my paintings, pastel drawings and experiments with a monotype technique. A few I have retained as part of my own collection. At that time in the ‘fifties’, I painted in oils and later became known for my tapestries.  Constant repetition of facts, I hope will imprint on the mind of the reader a sense of growth in my work, developing with new ideas with the passing of the years and seen with a historical perspective.

My writings are taken from biographical notes, prepared for exhibitions, articles, leaflets and brochures written over the years since 1958 and form the basis of it.                             

One of the founders of modern architecture, the late Maxwell Fry OBE, was professor of architecture at the Royal Academy school.  He was in partnership with Gropius in 1934-36, and with Le Corbusier in 1950-54 in the Chandigarh Capital Project now in a dismal state. His book Art in a Machine Age was published in 1968.  I met him the following year as I was weaving my ‘machine man’ figures.  Having seen these figures in my home, as well as my paintings and drawings, he agreed to open my exhibition. In his address, he said:

‘Miriam Sacks’ work is something of which one can properly use the word unique; it is only one of its kind I know of, and it is a very particular and extraordinary kind’. He continues, speaking of my tapestries, ‘You know Mozart could carry a whole work in his mind as he went about in the open air. The whole work was in his mind to be transcribed when he got back to his desk. This revelation of a piece of music he transcribed on to paper as a slogging piece of work, which I am told it is.  So we have to accept it – that it is absolutely possible for an idea to lie in somebody’s mind and be furthered forth through the hand.  I have worked with Le Corbusier, who supports this theory. …  So I was stopped in my tracks when Miriam told me that she makes no cartoons whatsoever because normally we feel we have to make a sketch or working drawing, and that an idea can’t come out from this mind on a  finger-point, as it were. And yet her work proves it is possible.’

I have called this autobiography A Web of Threads – a New Approach as Artist and Innovator of Tapestry interwoven with Painting and Sculpture – a long title.  It involves a subtitle – Balance of Hand, Heart and Head. Threads physically and spiritually interconnect with my life experiences, talents and knowledge, gained over decades. It combines sight and insight, enhanced by my knowledge gained over decades as a social anthropologist, trained as such and retaining an awareness today, as well as a musician, not to mention dance. It goes back to memories of childhood.

We live in times of great social change interwoven with industrialization fostering new energies and the ever-increasing growth of problems of over-population, in the country and in the cities. As a result of vast developments in science and technology, the individual is in transformation with a widening mental outlook through impressions from our media, written and electronic.

Our environment has been affected as human beings try to master nature and satisfy human needs with greed. Our balance has been psychologically and sociologically affected. Music interweaves with my atypical medium of tapestry and approach in relation to colours and textures, especially polyphonic textures, and in complexity of form with new ideas and concepts as a mirror of social change.

This is the century of the common man. I suppose we can go back to the French Revolution, followed by the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions to see more and more glimpses unfolding of change.

(NB. In rewriting this introduction as we near the end of the century, what is becoming apparent with the Labour government in power is the widening gap between rich and poor and seeing art in terms of graphic design and the importance of computer technology, which will become the guiding star as the material world takes over and the millennium heralds still more change.)

Each artist has his or her own style and as I do not fit into the official one-directional areas of recognition in contemporary art, I certainly know that my vision has its legitimate place.  Now that I have come full circle, I hope these writings will reveal this – a very personal account involving imagination linking to reality. When I say ‘full circle’, I must mention that my last painting in oils I did in the ‘fifties’ is of clowns.  It was then that I put down my brushes to take up needles and threads to explore a new type of canvas.  There is an element in my work that ties up weaving and interweaving with sophisticated thoughts, timelessly old and curiously modern. They go back long, long ago, to use a cliché, to the mists of time, and I am especially inspired by biblical writings from both old and new testaments, especially Exodus and Matthew 25:35. But I am fully aware that I live in the 20th century, in the modern age with its downsides and upsides, its anguish and joys and its problems of industrialization.

Exodus includes the first five books of the Pentateuch, tying up with Moses delivering the ten commandments and departing quietly (remember he was dumb), having done what was required of him. The quote from Matthew 25:35 is, ‘For I was hungry and you gave me meat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me.’

Referring now to my medium of tapestry, in particular in writing of my innovative approach, I have interwoven a slender background of loom weaving by contrast, in order to emphasize that although I call my art form tapestry, it took its own path, and as such it must be viewed in a different context to work involving threads known as ‘fibre art’ in our modern age. I stand alone in the way in which I use threads. It has a warp-weft orientation related to my experience in life. It is a hybrid in that it interweaves with the aesthetics of painters with a multifaceted dimension.

In 1969, when interviewed by The Times, I said, ‘My work belongs nowhere and everywhere’, I feel I have squared the circle in my major work of ‘The Modern Mercies’.  I hope you agree.’

I was born and educated in Cape Town, South Africa, by the sea in the year 1922. My mother told me I was very blessed as I was born in a caul. According to folklore if you are born in the caul, which is the amniotic lining of the womb which sometimes comes away and surrounds the baby at birth, you will never drown and will be psychic.  In a way this is true for me but not altogether so.  Read on to understand why.

1922 is the year in which Sir Frederick Grant Banting, living in Canada, discovered insulin. I correlate the dates as I am a severe diabetic, living on four injections a day. At first, I lived on porcine insulin. I no longer live on animal insulin and believe that in time animals will be used less and less by the referring of knowledge gained in the laboratories through scientific work with animals as well as the help of technicians and computers. That I do not like.  Diabetes is in my genes so an inherited condition. When I grew up, we had no antibiotics – aspirin brought down temperatures. I suffered a severe bout of scarlet fever for six weeks with a trained nurse to look after me, while a sheet dipped in disinfectant hung over the door of the room and no one was allowed near there. In my teens, my mother took me on a first visit to Johannesburg where I contracted infective hepatitis and I was not expected to live. However, I am still here in spite of little hope of survival then and, what is more, perhaps a little longer because of a disciplined healthy food regime.

My maternal grandmother had diabetes. I remember her being paralyzed on one side of her body, dragging her leg, limping with a walking stick and dying of diabetes while living on injections of insulin. The syringes were cumbersome and painful to use. She was injected by her younger daughter, my Aunt Margaret (Marge) who devoted her life to her and never married on this account but who, at the same time, worked hard as a secretary to a stock broker. I did not like my grandmother, a very demanding, dominating woman. However I felt very sorry for her in this condition.

My brother, a radiologist, had diabetes and recently died, ultimately contracting a stroke. He had a large practice as a radiologist with equipment for six rooms, where he catered for the needs of the black miners in Johannesburg. He gave up his large practice in South Africa at the age of forty five. Because he was married to a Swedish women, they left for Sweden, where he continued to work in the Stockholm hospital, but not for long. He retired to the Isle of Man because he could no longer work. How fortunate I have been to have the ability to express myself through my art and be creative. It gave me understanding.

I retain vivid and detailed memories of my childhood from a very early age between now and three years old. I remember when I had to have my photograph taken. I threw a tantrum on the way to the photographic studio. Kicking and screaming, I threw myself flat on to the street, while my mother became very angry. I have the photograph now on the ledge of my bookcase in my bedroom.  You would think butter would not melt in my mouth. I am smiling so sweetly, swathed in a net as they amused me. I certainly remember all my clothes, especially their styles and colours like my cherry red coat with a grey fur collar.  Special were my dresses embroidered with cross stitch around the hem in pink and black on white and made with my mother’s hands.  Also the multi-coloured soft leathered shoes, in subtle colours, my mother bought me.  She had very good taste, understood quality and loved colour.  I remember the shop and trying on the shoes. I can see myself standing in our small front garden where there was a hibiscus tree where, amongst its pink red flowers, I played with my five chameleons, one of which was called strangely ‘peace;  it crawled the branches very slowly as its keenly watchful eyes rolled each side of its head. School, I found a joy, especially when my teacher showed me how to knit and at home I made clothes for my doll by using my Singer sewing machine for children, which I still have today. It looks a little battered unfortunately with certain parts missing.

When about seven years old, I entered my grade II dancing examination. The examiner was well known. For mime, which contributed five marks to a total of one hundred, she asked me to imitate a crippled boy which I refused to do as I thought it cruel, having no comprehension of the art of acting and so rightfully was marked nought out of five. I was appallingly sensitive and could never make an actress although I was quite good at imitating.  Then at the age of ten, I received a special prize for art, which was given for the first time in the school, as I was particularly good at drawing. It was a book by Charles Dickens with abridged versions of his stories, the first of which was Great Expectations. It encouraged me to read the stories in full. Each had a different texture related to sadness, happiness, adventure which so interested me. There were no Roald Dahl ‘chocolate shop’ or more sophisticated literature of the problems confronting children today. No anthropomorphic stories. Dr. Dolittle, yes. Treasure Island, yes. 

Going back to my early dancing days which I enjoyed so much, it was at the age of five, I especially looked forward weekly to doing the Lancers in our old barn-like loft. Naturally our partners were boys and my enjoyment then is graphically sketched in memory. I certainly liked that.

In case I give the impression of having a halo round my head, this is far from the truth. I was about ten years old when I recall going to my music lessons dressed In my red riding hood rain cape which was very much the vogue in that day. On my way home, I was set upon by a gang of young boys which had a traumatic affect on me. Yes, it happened in those days as well, but not quite so violently; just in the mode of frightening me which it certainly did.

My music teacher was born in Ceres in the Western Cape.  Trained as a musician overseas at the Royal College of Music, she married and became Caroline Benson Hodgson. Distinctive in appearance, tall and willowy, she had aqualine features and wore her greying hair in a bob with a fringe. She was a sculptor’s dream physically. In London, after her husband died, she met a companion Miss Eastwood and they shared their lives. I am privileged to have had her as a piano teacher. I remember she had a great friend, a British cricketer, who became a sort of hero of mine. Each year she held a prize-giving concert in her rooms in a flat she had in a beautiful private hotel in the impressive gardens called Haslemere in Hatfield Street, Cape Town. I won many prizes which I have kept to this day.  They included special editions of music, Peters edition leatherbound and inscribed.  Other prizes included a coral necklace and my treasured one is an old musical box which as you turned its little handle, it played ‘I wish I was in Dixie’. It is contained in a handwoven basket with a lid. 

Mrs Hodgson pushed me to perform a little too much. I am not a performer and I certainly found it a strain after my brother’s death.  I was invited by William Pickerel, the Cape Town orchestra’s (of the thirties) to perform Mozart’s G Minor Piano Concerto No 17 at the age of ten. I practised for it but refused to perform after my humiliating experience in playing for an eisteddfod and breaking down on the stage of Cape Town City Hall. I sobbed so much.  The City Hall is an historical building of the turn of the century. It is more famous now as Nelson Mandela made his historic speech from the steps of this landmark when he became a free man and then President, later Head of ANC. I continued to play at eisteddfods, winning medals until I was twenty years old.

At my music lessons, I sensed every note, developing a tremendous feeling for tonal quality, conscious of the amount of weight that came through my fingers as I touched the keyboard.  It is strange I felt that quality when I first wove my tapestries. As I gave texture to it through the weight I gave to thread as I curled it around to become knot like, I felt as if I was playing the piano. It was my right hand that experienced this.  It is something – a textural quality I find lacking in modern pop. Rhythm, yes, ‘pop’ gives the audience and Elton John excels at melody in an extraordinary way, with accompanying lyrics appropriate to the time in which we live.

I was about eleven years old and we were already in our new house when my mother and father were further traumatized. They were trying to recover from my brother Basil’s death when a man presented himself at our front door carrying my sister Ruth in his arms. She was bleeding profusely from her left arm where a tourniquet now drenched with blood had been applied. I was very frightened. She was immediately rushed to hospital and operated upon by Professor Saint, the most imminent surgeon. Her artery had been severed and blood diverted to give collateral circulation.  She recovered eventually but I do believe that is why she ultimately had an early death, apart from giving herself too much in her marriage, taking all the weight in understanding her children or being strict with them for their own good. Their father was a loving father. I never saw him angry towards them. She was the strong one, the aware parent. The intelligent parent. She loved her husband very much, but did not always agree with him in his ethical practice of his Judaism, which he observed conventionally in a changing world. He seemed to change when he remarried in that his new wife taught him to help her. 

I had a dog to whom I was devoted.  Lobo by name, he had an extremely unpleasant habit of biting passersby. I was grief stricken when he had to be put to sleep with a canker of the ear which affected his balance.

As I grew up from the age of eight years old, I was known as a ‘tomboy’ and could give back what I got. When my boy and girl cousins, Isidore and Esther, spent their weekend with us we, my brother Harold, my sister Ruth and cousins, all slept in the same bedroom. As soon as the lights were switched off in the evening when we were supposed to sleeping, I took the boys on in a pillow flight while Esther and Ruthie dived under the sheets. I used to do acrobats standing on my head on the leather armchair and kicked a hole in the wallpaper. My father flew into a temper while my mother restrained him from hitting me. Then Isidore and I gained entrance to the garage and sat in our old Studebaker car. He switched on the key left in the ignition and the car immediately lurched forward, banging into the wall. 

Such mischievous episodes were endless, he being the ringleader and very naughty indeed, I following close behind. I am actually fortunate I have my fingertips on my left hand intact, for he caught it in the door and the top was practically sliced off, leaving a permanent mark till this day.  One particular episode almost led to my having to be rescued from the middle of the lake where we went to catch tadpoles. He lost the oar of the boat which went into the water. Eventually, it was retrieved and so was I. This occurred between the ages of eight years old to early teens. Lakeside has become become Marina de Gama today – a beautiful place in which to live.

As childhood was replaced by adolescence, I continued in a more serious vein, especially with my piano playing, practising many hours a day, getting up at six in the morning to practise.  It was hard work and a good training.

I completed my education at the University of Cape Town, spending the war years there.  They were sad years as I lost many friends. My father used to bring home for meals many of the ‘army boys’ and naval officers passing through Cape Town on their way to Egypt. My mother fed them very well. They came in troopships.  I was young and did enjoy this company. I see their faces clearly today as young men and often wonder what happened to them in the war.

I received a good training, not only in dance and music but also harmony and counterpoint, later in my teens taking music as a subject at school, while also enjoying all the sports. I used to like going to the cinema, a particular one, the Alhambra, was architecturally quite splendid in Spanish style and with a blue sky and stars. What a pity they knocked it down to be replaced by a modern lot of offices!

I have always carried within me a rich heritage from childhood of memories by the sea, exploring beaches for shells, climbing rocks and picking wild flowers in the veldt. It is not only nature in abundance that has provided me with a rich storehouse of imagery, but also the experience of a human element of a lively diversification which has addicted me to Africa as it was diversification of peoples from different ethnic groups. All this was marred by the sadness of the loss of my baby brother of one and a half years old, who passed away suddenly when I was ten years old. I was not told of his death despite hearing the threat of suicide by my father who became very distraught. I was removed, at midnight, from my bed to the house of friends of my parents and not allowed to attend the funeral.  When I returned home, I found my mother in a melancholic mood, was hardly greeted by her, and sheets all over the mirrors for ‘sitting shiva’ – an old custom amongst orthodox Jews which has no meaning for me. 

My parents were not orthodox but traditional in a superficial, conventional way. In fact, my father was a rebel relatively speaking. 

I sensed the whole mood in our home had changed and there was little communication with me. I began to think irrationally that it was my fault. Mr brother was, however, poisoned by our maid.  I learned of this in 1970. The story was told to me by my sister Ruth. It was just before she died, she said that the coloured maid was jealous of the white nanny who looked after my little brother Basil. Having a white nanny in South Africa was most unusual in the ‘thirties’ but my father, a prominent merchant in the fishing industry, could afford it. The maid disappeared the next day after his sudden death, when my mother received a letter from the maid’s friend that she confessed to her that she had poisoned Basil with strichnine.  Born to my parents, late in their lives, he was known as the ‘late lamb’ and much loved, particularly by me. The murder of children in today’s world is commonplace: in fact artists paint this as has been seen in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition, aptly named, held at the Royal Academy now showing the controversial portrait of the murderess Myra Hindley. It is covered with imprints of childrens’ hands. Life has taught me to come to terms with cruelty and forgive for one’s own sake. I have. I do recommend forgiveness for human beings, to change and grow and become healthy in mind.  She has certainly paid an agonizing price for her vile act. Who is to say how the murdered children would have developed. That, however, has nothing to do with law. I came to terms with a brutal act which affected me my whole life. The exhibition ‘Sensation’ is, of course, attention seeking and so draws the crowds, encouraged by the media and second rate people called critics. To respect it provides a springboard against which artists can react. That is how things work as the pendulum swings to give perspective and transcendence through understanding.

Going back in time to the war years, which prevented me from going overseas to study music further, I instead studied for my MA degree, majoring in Social Anthropology, as well as subsidiary subjects including geology, pyschology and languages (English and German). I attended PhD classes to which my sister and I were specially invited by way of privilege. Near the end of the war, I married and followed my husband, Ian from pillar to post for he had joined the medical corps of the army when he qualified as a doctor in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. I travelled (packing and unpacking) from home to home in South Africa.

In 1946, I left Cape Town, following Ian on a troopship bound for London, where we lived for five years and where our eldest daughter Janet was born at Queen Charlotte’s hospital, Hammersmith, in 1947. We had wonderful support from my parents during these difficult years of post war Britain.  It is not possible for the younger generation today to comprehend what it was like ‘living on coupons’ as we did for a number of years.  The system continued till about 1949.  Being pregnant in 1946, I was privileged to have a little more milk than others.  I loathed powdered eggs.  When Ian and I managed to get away to the continent in our small car, we were overjoyed to come across cherry trees laden with black cherries in Belgium. We abandoned our car and pulled down the branches to tear the cherries off the trees. No coupons for these and we ate to our hearts content.  We were fortunate and privileged to own a car, to have an au pair who looked after Janet, to have central heating when it worked.  My father’s support to us was given very directly in a manner which never made Ian feel he owed him anything. He even gave him his pure wool dressing gown while my mother brought us masses of tinned food from the States where she was on holiday.

As we drove through the quaint cobbled old towns in Northern France where we enjoyed French food, I recall becoming very angry with Ian when he knocked down an elderly peasant from his bicycle  as he battled through the driving rain.  He just drove on and never stopped to help him. Then we returned to London so happy to see Janet.  She brought such happiness in the coldest winter followed by the hottest summer in 1949.  Everyone had blocked pipes in the building from snow and ice. I remember offering a male friend our bath to sleep in when he called to see us.  He had no bed to sleep in and was extremly grateful! We used to place Janet in her pram in the garage recess on the Finchley Road. It was quite safe then. The frozen pipes caused a serious situation and you could not get the help needed from the government. They promised to come and just never turned up, going on strike when they pleased. I see myself walking in my friend’s home as water poured down from the ceiling and I had my umbrella up. Such were the hazards which still prevail with slight improvement where there are old central hearing radiators in our costly block of flats today. But in a way these were good times with elegant living. I remember going to the theatre quite often, where we were served tea on a tray at the interval as we sat in our seats.  What a luxury.  A play at that time that stands out in my mind is ‘The Lady’s not for Burning’ with Pamela Brown (sounds a little like Mrs Thatcher thought of it when saying the lady is not for turning).  I saw my much admired actors and actresses namely, at the top of this list, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

Ian qualified as an opthalmic surgeon from Moorfields and in 1950 I once more did packing up of our home and followed him to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. which become part of the Central African Federation under Roy Welensky. It is now Zimbabwe. Then South Africa had begun officially a policy of apartheid as we chose to settle in Bulawayo which had no such official policy, but suffered from colonialism and where apartheid was unofficially practised.  This was decidedly worse in its narrowness, especially in the treatment of its black people. I often make paintings of African women standing stately with their baskets on their heads or standing at waterholes. In Zimbabwe, our second daughter Angela was born in 1954. Another happy occasion. The child was almost born in the bush which we had to traverse before reaching the hospital, which we just reached in time. It was a hospital run by nuns.

We lived in Bulawayo where there was no university which as a graduate in Social Anthropology, I could attend. One was opened in Salisbury (now Harare).  It gave much needed education to black people especially. It is now 1998 and I heard the university is now closing which is really sad. To return to the 1950s, I started applying my energies and a little talent to portrait painting classes given by Thea Hunt, who trained at the Slade School of Art in London and worked on décor at the Covent Garden opera. She was well equipped to teach me my tones when I attended her classes, where we practised drawing and painting from models.  I was encouraged by the results and comments. I began to help in her art school where she taught children to paint, model in clay, work in scraper board and other media. Unfortunately, she started to suffer from schizophrenia and lost her sense of reality, while suffering from the over-powering authoritarianism of her father, the Bishop of Matebeleland. Her mother, a very gentle woman, was also a painter. Thea was utterly squashed by her father and her very handsome brother John eventually shot himself.  When she was placed in an asylum, I inherited the materials of her art school and set up a small studio in our converted garage where I taught young children, from four to ten years, One in particular is Pamela Silver, who has an international reputation and now lives in Israel.  She is known for her watercolours and has been invited to exhibit in St Petersburg as well as Tokyo, the States, and is to exhibit at Leighton House in April this year [1998]. I shall be there on the opening night, looking with great satisfaction at her development and acclaim. 

I also helped a young boy who was then suffering from a near breakdown situation as, while playing with his brother, he found him hanged with a tie round his neck after he closed the door on him.  I was a sort of pyschologist art teacher and a therapist. The boy did start to be healed. The atmosphere in the studio was a very happy one for all the children and myself. We learned from each other. My converted studio garage previously housed our car which I ejected to stand in our drive in our huge garden. A big window in the studio at the rear overlooked the garden with a view of an African thorn tree with a twisting trunk. We saw Angela in her pram either sleeping or performing her antics. She had an attachment to the Pekinese dog Ming who had a very long  pedigree. He was the last of his line, but I would not allow him to breed. I gave him to the two young girls who adored him. Janet had a chocolate brown doberman pincher, Prince by name, who must have been caught in the traps set for animals in the bush as he never returned one day from the bush, and there was much hurt. He was a beautiful animal. 

The garden was a tranquil and interesting setting with trees and bougainvillea creepers where treacherous snakes crept in the branches. Fortunately, the Africans knew how to dispose of them by catapulting stones very accurately to fracture their necks.  Our cat also kept the snakes at bay.  We had spiders galore which were part of the decorations of the wall. I found them very beautiful and admired their engineering skills when it came to threading their webs, woven with great ingenuity. They have since inspired me to draw their webs focusing on their threads. Perhaps the most beautiful sight is the drops glistening in the sunlight, hanging from threads they spin. I made drawings of spiders’ webs with pastels using shades of whites and greys on black and charcoal paper. They are natural engineers and understand structure intimately.

I go into this weaving aspect in more detail in my final chapter when discussing the work of the extraordinarily creative sculptress Louise Bourgeois, whose parents were restorers of tapestries and who now lives in the USA. I guided African children in the use of paint in the African township and this again reminded me of Louise Bourgeois. Her latest work at the age of 86 years refers back to her childhood memories and she sees her mother as a weaver portraying someone with great love, unlike her father whom to say the least she disliked. Louise writes of the healing powers of the needle and shows this in her sculpture in showing balance.

I began to initiate an interchange of children’s paintings with the Brooklyn Museum when I visited New York as a result of meeting up with Toby Rose, Head of the Education Section and who worked for museums internationally. I also exchanged children’s paintings with Silvermine Art Gallery in Connecticut where the dogwood trees grew.  Included in these ventures, I initiated participation in the Daily Worker’s children’s art exhibitions in London with a prestigious judging committee, including Sir Herbert Reed. Some of my pupils gained certificates of honours, a recognition to give much encouragement to them for their achievement and for me and my initiative.

In my daily life I practised the piano, both classics and jazz, playing at parties. I became bored with the flirtations and superficiality I experienced on these occasions and my enthusiasm for painting and teaching children took over my life. My little art school was the only one of its kind in Bulawayo. I certainly did not make much money but received encouragement while learning from the children as well. I worked daily with oil paints and continued to experiment, also making large pastel drawings some of which I have kept. They included ‘Woman Thinking’, ‘Still Life with Figs and Oranges’ and a painting in oils, ‘Two Figures Standing at a Bus Stop in the Rain’, which still hangs on my wall. I can see myself sitting opposite the bus stop in my car and drawing the figures. It was the bus stop where Africans met. I repeat ‘apartheid’ was not official but it existed in a worse form than in South Africa.

The drawings of the figures is in my collection of sketches on cartridge paper, which has become yellow with age. The year was 1956 and I also painted ‘Refugees’ in remembrance of the Hungarian uprising. The subject matter, including a young man, an old grandmother and small boy clinging to her, is very much a subject of our time. Worked in an old style of applying paint to the canvas, it lacks texture yet seems to talk to all my visitors because of the subject matter movingly interpreted in a harmonious composition. My monotypes that were bought were ‘Girl playing a mandoline’, ‘Woman dancing’, which I have kept, as well as ‘Owl’.  I experimented on one occasion with a monotype on tissue paper called ‘Fisherwoman’. This is in my collection. There is another of two women walking together, their right and left arms interlinked while baskets swing from their arms. It has travelled to this country, with its owner, Professor Isaac Shapiro from the London School of Economics. I often wonder what happened to ‘Goose Girl’ which was also sold. 

While living in Bulawayo my interest in nature continued to flower as I made excursions into the bush. While still living in Zimbabwe, I made a journey of several months to the States, Britain and Europe, including Norway and Sweden. My visit to New York affected me profoundly. Coming from a Central African country where I was surrounded by acres of open space of natural wild bush, made me somewhat hostile to the enclosed artificial environment of huge skyscrapers, with concrete and glass, in New York City. I saw little that was green. It was the antithesis of the limitless dimensions I knew so well on the African continent. I felt people were constantly measuring time with clocks and behaving like robots. Today I feel very different about time. 

Regarding art, my feelings and thoughts were ambivalent.  In the museums and galleries, I saw messy canvasses of abstract expressionism with which I had difficulty identifying, especially the wild tachism of Jackson Pollock, favourite of Peggy Guggenheim.  They were devoid of the human quality and, as such, an aesthetic indulgence with which I could not identify. However, I did see much that interested me and thought about and found in leaflets and pamphlets which inspired me such as Archifbald McLeish’s ‘Art Education and the Creative Process’, which I took away with me from the Museum of Modern Art. It was published by the Committee of Art Education and says much in its analysis. My reaction on reading it was that in the smallest pamphlets or books one finds often the greatest knowledge, the wisest words which I called ‘jewels’. In its ten or twelve pages are such significant insights and use of words, such as, ‘that the creativity of others will release his own, if they are the right others and if he himself is right to receive them at the moment when he comes to them’. Today it applies equally to the female of the sexes, may I hastily add before I am accused of sexism. I am, in fact very much in favour of the female voices heard today in balance with the male. Archibald McLeish continues to point out what I continually stress ‘that to see a poem (and I substitute the word ‘a work of art’) as a creative action in space and time is to see it in the context of human life and that a work of art is significant if it enlarges the area in which we can live. In other words, it has the power of enhancement, giving increased awareness and bringing beauty through colour and texture while encompassing a ring of truth.  It stirs the imagination.’

I was also extremely fortunate, at the time, of having entry to the homes of people who owned big collections of impressionist paintings. It worked like a revelation for me. One of my friends, the late Blanche Weisberg, was not only a friend of Picasso’s but was instrumental with others from the Museum of Modern Art in New York in bringing Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to the Museum. She boasted repeatedly how she sat up the whole night at the quayside where ships docked, awaiting the arrival of the crate containing this famous large painting. Blanche was devoted to Picasso’s memory. To her it was an important celebration. I on the other hand, coming from an African milieu at that time, remember it was entrenched with the poverty of the black people. Yet at the same time, I did share her enthusiasm for the greatness of Picasso as an artist although not always as a particularly great human being. His ‘Guernica’ did cry out admirably against the Spanish war with a new aesthetic, defying war and destruction seen in the tortured twisted neck of the horse. A visual power condeming the cruelty of a civil war with Franco at the head. Thinking of Kosovo and  Slobodan Milosevic today with his obscene ethnic cleansing, separating families, making people homeless.

Blanche was very much involved in the art world. She naturally criticised my visiting South Africa annually during ‘apartheid’ years, in spite of my leaning towards helping students regardless of colour, and in preparation of what was coming. Blanche, later in 1966, bought one of my tapestries in black and white, ‘Unstill Life Kitchen Stove’, which she placed with her African Collection.   When I visited the States in 1956/57 she took me to the homes of her friends the Goldsteins, extremely wealthy people who owned many Modiglianis.  I often thought of their lifestyle quite unlike mine. When her husband died, Mrs Goldstein had to rent the entire floor of a big hotel to ‘house’ all these treasures.  Now she was alone. Did the treasures speak to her? Did they have a significance other than material?  Music and art certainly did console me when my sister died. When my mother died it was my tapestries, my paintings into which I poured my heart in a rebirth in which I found the ‘god’ within myself and with others.

Blanche also took me to the home of Sam Salz, the most famous of Impressionist dealers. He had quite a technique of salesmanship; he handled his work of art discretely as he brought them out one at a time and slowly revealed the painting under cover. He occupied six floors in a new skyscraper, the like of which I had never seen.

I was both interested and repelled by what I witnessed at a very extravagant party that Sam Salz gave with plates dripping with oodles of crayfish and rich food. (Incidentally, my own father had gone in 1936 from Cape Town to visit the World Fair in New York and he had put the highly delicious and edible crayfish on the American market, where they were called lobsters.) This extravaganza was to entice the buyers sitting in a corner playing cards. Some were genuinely interested in art and the vision it gave; others thought in terms of dollars and status symbols. At that moment I saw it in terms of ‘conspicuous waste’ only. 

The whole atmosphere of the party was wrong. In contrast to the waste, my mind thought of the starving, fly-covered African children I saw lining the road as we drove to the Matopos outside Bulawayo, with their outstretched hands, asking for bread. The contrast was painful. Yet here I was in New York enjoying my new vistas through art and a cultural past. Where is the line between reality and imagination?

The highlight of several weeks in New York City was my visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where in the Cloisters, I saw the glorious Lady of the Unicorn tapestries which were so little valued in their own medieval times. I became interested in the medium of tapestry with its rich textures and colours enhanced though faded by time. I could literally feel the mild textured surfaces with wools  from the bodies of live animals. Thereafter, I became aware of tapestry colours of natural dyes.

My reaction on seeing these tapestries was twofold, as overwhelmed as I was. I felt the time in which we lived was a time of texture and I envisaged trying to create tapestries on needlepoint linen tapestry canvas with needles and threads using both my hands in manipulating the threads and holding the canvas. This is what I wanted to do. It lay dormant as a thought as I found the loom woven tapestries, as beautiful as they were, too machine-like and precise in surface finish.  I foresaw a more modulated surface. That is how I felt from the beginning when I did not want to restrict myself to a loom. 

Loom-woven tapestries flowered as an art form in medieval times.  Later, with industrialisation, this brought a new materialism and commercialisation so that tapestry lost that glorious quality of creativity, only to be revived again in our century by Lurcat. The fifteenth-century Unicorn Tapestries were remarkable for their outstanding design and portrayal of episodes in the hunt of the unicorn.

Seeing them hanging in the Metropolitan Museum literally changed my life as an artist. The Cloisters, which is a separate building like the original Cloisters in France, is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is vast. It houses six tapestries of this series with fragments of another. The unicorn, a mythical wild creature with a horn, became tamed when confronted by a virgin maiden and represents a symbol of Christ. It is interesting to know that they were so little valued as the masterpieces they were seen to be several centuries later. They, in fact, were later used as old rags with which to cover hotbeds of rotting manure in gardens.  Quite an incredible story.

In France, the famous tapestries of the Middle Ages are scenes of the Apocalypse of Angers, woven in the later 14th Century.  The function of these tapestries was to keep out the cold but also as a decoration for a great occasion adding an air of grandeur and splendour, their magnificent colours of blues and crimson pinks, enriching the overall design. A great occasion celebrated in a grand style by talented craftsmen weaving interesting, careful details.

Before the Middle Ages, tapestries were much smaller, the size such as Coptic woven art seen in museums today. I was always moved by their hauntingly interesting faces, with large dark eyes, windows into their souls, much treasured and depicting a human value.

The huge tapestries of the Middle Ages have maintained details woven into them. Look at the magnificent detail of a hand, how it gestures, or a face, expressive and not distorted a la Picasso or mannerism.  One cannot but admire their beauty, irregular or not, as well as the whole humanist approach associated with tapestry then.  Furthermore, aesthetically, any part of the tapestry has, like a Chinese painting, wholeness of composition in the overall totality. Therein lies a great beauty related to structure. The miniaturist approach can be seen in the flowered background in particular. I am awestruck by this total harmony of detail and overall larger comment through human figures.  It was not a mechanistic world yet as it is today with its relativism.

Until 1250, going back two centuries, most elaborate tapestries used in Europe were imported from the Orient, the Near East and Mediterranean countries. The crusades helped to open up trade routes between East and West and Italy, with Florence playing a leading role in textile production. A little later, Gothic hangings were admirable treasures of these countries always noted for their richness. 

I refer to loom-woven tapestry in the 20th century now. Jean Lurcat was a French artist who revived loom-woven tapestries in the 20th century. Lurcat’s ‘Song of the World’ is the largest sequence woven by weavers for many years. An enormous work, it has nine parts, and is 245 feet long. One cannot but notice it woven with a cartoon numbered technique. 

It is a breathtaking public decoration of a very important and valid subject accessible to all, important to all, for it is in praise of our home, the Earth, and it is a public work.  His use of colours is eye-catching and vibrant and so admirably warming. I find it unnecessarily large and in our modern age, taking up too much wall space, for I have stressed scaling down in size. It belongs more in spirit to the tapestries of the era of the ‘Lady and the Unicorn’ and the ‘Apocalyse of Angers’ when tapestries had a crucial function of keeping out draughts and were enormous in size.

Since Lurcat, modern tapestry has moved in a very different direction aesthetically, breaking down tradition more and more.  There was, as always happens, a reaction to some of his statements such as, ‘it must not resemble a painting as mine did because of its hybrid nature’. I feel sure, however, that Lurcat would have been interested in my atypical approach.  He would have seen the importance of the accent on the hybrid as a compromise and unity with painting and sculpture in terms of enhancement. This was particularly so on the European continent with its new spirit of reform in the ‘sixties’ as the spirit of the time changed and a variety of attitudes was employed to accentuate the return of a more tactile quality in art at the time, using the hand directly. In actual fact, as much as I worked with tapestry artists in our modern age, I identify more with painters although I regret the commercialisation of art, and my ideas, concepts and forms, stand alone.

In 1968 I stayed with my cousin Harry Alpert, Director of Sociology at UNESCO in Paris.  His wife, Anita, an art historian, and I visited the tapestry artist, Saint Saens, in his studio in Paris. He had worked with Lurcat and was related to the famous musician of the same name. She acted as a translator and communicator between Saint Saens and myself. My introduction to him came from a television personality, who was the head of the peace movement in France, namely Claude Bourdet. He became acquainted with my work as an artist when he stayed with me in the sixties, admiring my tapestries in particular and, seeing my struggle, he wanted to promote my name in France. 

To return to my trip to the United States. I travelled across the USA to San Francisco, then returned to New York to visit my family, friends and more museums and theatres. Enjoying the wonderful restaurants, including being taken to Sardi’s restaurant, meeting the cast of the ‘Caine Mutiny’ through my cousin Herman Wouk, Pulitzer prize winner in 1955, life was indeed interesting and fun.  In the entertainment world of musicals at which the Americans exceed, I was taken to the first night of ‘My Fair Lady’ with the elflike Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, making his debut. What costumes in black and white! What décor! I also saw ‘My Most Happy Fella’ and the famous ‘Beggars’ Opera’ with Lotte Lenya, whose husband, Kurt Weill wrote the music. By contrast I also saw ‘Waiting for Godot’ - intellectually alive but which I did not particularly like.

Herman’s brother, Dr. Victor Wouk of electric car fame, saw me off and waved me goodbye as I returned to London in the luxury liner, the Queen Elizabeth.  My grand and informative journey was not over, in fact it was only just beginning. On my return to London, Janet and I travelled North by car to Inverness via Glasgow and motored down to visit the Edinburgh Festival, so enjoying the art exhibition of Cubism, whose strange broken shapes and somewhat drab beige and greys dominated the canvases, which I did not appreciate. We continued back to London via the beautiful Lake District, after which Janet returned to her school in Beaconsfield. Then I headed by boat from Hull to Bergen in Norway, land of the midnight sun, after which I visited Oslo. 

There I saw many paintings by Munch, sadly an alcoholic.  His etching ‘The Scream’ is hauntingly moving and talks to everyone who sees it. I remember the famous sculpture, the Vigeland installation, in Frogner Park. It was an eye-opener. I was left with a deep impression of the artist’s humanity.  When you first see it, it is overwhelming because of its large scale. The 212 sculptures feature naked figures, some of which wind around a long pillar which reaches into the sky, while others stand nearby, portraying the lives of people from life to death. Vigeland, the sculptor, wrote ‘Human life is the highest life in Art and Literature’. Not one of the sculptures looks the same and they include babies, dancing girls, an old man standing at an overflowing fountain of running water near a tree, all bristling with life, often in stone.  It was an impression of movement and stillness in life. Vigeland wrote that the French sculptor Rodin, with his sense of realism, made a strong impact on him, seen in his sketches stressing the spiritual – the very essence of which he tries to show again and again in his original ideas.  He had a great love of people, of humanity, of whom the city of Oslo was justifiably proud.

Then on to Stockholm. In Sweden, which I enjoyed more than Norway despite the Vigeland Park, I searched the shops for tapestry wools and bought a decorative piece of weaving, loom woven, as I had done in Norway, and which I still have on my antique table in my lounge today.  They are my treasures which create memories of a long time ago – 1958-59.

Through my sister-in-law Gunvor, I met interesting friends of the family and was made a member of the elite Bellman Club named after their long dead famous poet. Her cousin Gand introduced me to the Club. She was an advanced thinker and had adopted Vietnamese orphans through her connection with Save the Children. Then returning to London after six months travelling, seeing and meeting old and new friends and family, Janet and I returned to Bulawayo via a mail ship bound for Cape Town and by train to Rhodesia. We stopped on the way in Cape Town.  It was a very long journey on the Windsor Castle, which was good fun.  I certainly appreciate aeroplanes today as a marvel of technology anticipated by the visionary artist Leonardo who dreamt of flying in the future and, in the same way, foresaw life in a submarine. 

Now, in the millennium year of 2000, there is an exhibition at the Science Museum. It is on the principles of invention and is associated with many names of the Renaissance of men of outstanding gifts. Leonardo de Vinci heads the list. He was influenced by Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect. First and foremost, through their engineering skills, they are spiders of the material world, reminding me of that great modern artist Louise Bourgeois to whom I relate so strongly. 

Leonardo the engineer, as well as Brunelleschi and others, could work in so many areas as they did not have computers to work out everything. They had to experiment. They were broad in their understanding. Brunelleschi, referred to as an architect, understood the principles of how building a self-supporting brick dome gave birth to a principle. He built a working wooden platform like an engineer, knowing where the stress was taken.  The emphasis was on engineering, not so much on architecture.  Today, we don’t have the luxury of getting things wrong and having to find the answers. Our time is one in which we use new materials as in the millennium dome. In the days of the Renaissance, the emphasis was on principles. We can see Leonardo taking a machine apart and then putting it together again in a learning experience.   This was the start of ball bearings, the establishment of tower building – these were the principles of invention, four to five centuries ago, of Renaissance man. Quoting from the information leaflet with illustrations which include a model of the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome, it said that the artists’ workshops had more in common with a bustling factory than the artists studio, to use a modern cliché. All that work was the culmination of a long intellectual process which gave birth to this invention of machines. There was a machine for lifting materials, for clearing graves and earth from shallow ports, to mention a few.  But the master of these machines and mechanisms was Leonardo de Vinci, famous for his flying machine in which the wings were driven by back pedals and a hand-operated crank which powered a hoisting device.

I return to my tapestries and the needle. My tapestries have a physical density, whereas my paintings in watercolours have a lightness because of the paper I choose, giving transparency helped by the way in which I use space. My technique for my tapestries involves building up layers of threads as well as looking down through the layers of threads, while working at eye level.  I do not stand at an easel. The wool is held at the distance for reading. It is almost as if I work by feel, while looking at it nearby, and transferring my thoughts at the same time.

When back in Bulawayo, in 1957 I was informed that a painting of mine in oils was chosen for exhibition in London by Frank McEwen, Director of the National Gallery in Salisbury, now Harare.  It was a ‘basket of fruit with fruit cascading from the basket’.  More paintings continued to be chosen for the annual exhibitions at the National Gallery. However, despite this encouragement to continue as a painter using oil paints, I put down my paint brushes to take up my new tools of needles and scissors, my materials of contrasting textured thread and my canvas of linen threads, created for needleworkers but used in a very different way by me.  In fact my exploration of my canvases was then very basic. It was, however, the beginning of a very interesting journey in a stultifyingly narrow, limited society.

The needle is man’s first tool since he learnt to stand upright and learnt to grasp with the thumb. The oldest known needles with eyes date from about 25,000 years ago and were developed to sew together skins as clothing for stone age man. At the time they were made from bones of animals, from fish, and even thorns.  Man’s capacity for adaptability and invention was always inherent and related to survival. Stones were sharpened for use.  Metal needles were invented during the Bronze Age and the Romans used needles of bronze and iron. During the Middle Ages, the Cistercian monks developed the needle industry. They were known for their fine craftsmanship in ironwork. Today, of course, this simple tool is found in every sewing basket, in every doctor’s surgery to give injections and I use the needle to inject myself with insulin before I eat. Even in the twenty years I have had diabetes, the technology has improved the needle, while the new replaces the old which has become obsolete. I only hope they are not thrown on the scrap heap but are sent to countries in urgent need of them as they are still viable although not technologically up to date. I owe my life to man’s first tool while others misuse it for drugs to escape the harsh realities of life today.

By about 400 years ago in the time of the Tudors, people in Britain had begun to use needles for embroidery and fine sewing. I immediately think of Queen Elizabeth, her headgear and beautiful clothes with lacy collar. Today this simple invention fulfils so many good functions.

On my return to Bulawayo, I felt transformed and determined to try my hands at exploring tapestry my way.  The seed was sown on my trip to New York. It was a new beginning. I will always remember my visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian section as a highlight of information, of history and beautiful objects, particularly the intense blues of the stones used for scarabs and  the blue hippopotamus left a marked impression on my mind.  They were chosen from the many unforgettable objects to stir the imagination as postcards and prints that I bought to place on my studio walls in Bulawayo. I felt my students could enjoy them too and ask questions. I certainly returned inspired, especially by the medieval tapestries of the Cloisters which led to a very different way of my seeing tapestry related to my experiences in the changing 20th Century. My tapestry led through my own creativity to a hybrid form of work. I was inspired by the use of natural dyes, but my explorations and experimentations included a whole spectrum of natural fibres set against contrasting and artificial threads. My tapestry medium became a mixture of canvas work, tapestries and painting interwoven with new surfaces, new forms, new ideas and concepts. Doing it my way led me to my experimenting with the needle and threads on canvas of linen, using scissors to build constantly. Little did I anticipate to where it was to lead or how I was to weave together a tapestry of many facets. I did know, however, that it would take me on a long journey which would take a long time, requiring discipline, patience and a strong voice

To sum up, this is the way in which I worked and work today. All tapestries are worked directly onto my canvas as a painter works, that is with the aesthetics of a painter, without sketches but with a strong image held in my mind, working in harmony and counterpoint structurally. I am continually aware of the wide  spectrum of opposite textured threads coarse and fine, thick and thin, natural and artificial. On the canvas, I work in layers, layering threads horizontally to a varying thickness on the surface and leaving spaces to create depth. This is not achievable with paint and this is the tremendous advantage of my hybrid medium which looks like a painting because of its similar aesthetic. The use of opposite textures of threads juxtaposed, creates new energies and stronger shadows, the one texture contrasting with the other. The texture of threads has a much more tactile quality compared to paint and an inner quality of tangibility interwoven with the painting aesthetic. I call it ‘the tangible quality of the intangible’ felt deep within at the time.  This quality grew inside me due to a nervous breakdown from 1958 to 1962 in which I felt I was reborn, but in which I remember being plunged into the depths to rediscover myself

I had a nervous breakdown in 1958 and in my despair I saw only black. I was given shock treatment, quite unnecessarily. In the stifling society in which my pyschologist was a friend of Ian’s, I literally cured myself through my picking up threads of glorious colours and textures. Gradually the light enticed me. I experienced a structure of light and shade which interwove with a new growing vision with new ideas.  So that in time, literally in a rebirth, I found I could help others which was a joy. What determined my spirit to grow inside me was the awareness that my daughters needed their mother to give them continuity, which is forever my guiding star as they help me today. 

I place great emphasis on the fact that I use both my hands, unlike the art of painting that only uses one hand. The power of hands has left a marked imprint on me through the objects I saw in Zimbabwe, and the small collection of African objects that decorate my home remind me of something past, but part of my life. There are masks, finger-painted and carved in wood, carved African figurines, musical instruments. I see hands beating well-crafted drums, an important symbol in African culture of communication over wide distances. Dyed string covers wooden effigies and entwine bottles of different shapes in distinctly bright, raw African colours. Pipes from calabashes are decorated with clay and were smoked by both men and women. Fringes are looped and plaited from bark cloth to give a fuller textural dimension essentially African. They all have their own special significance in their creative power relating to a way of perceiving life and exploring and expressing within limits, basic human emotions of fears and faith, especially in the masks so meaningfully used on ceremonial occasions, full of ritual. This has changed with the changing westernized African continent but for some African people it is there to influence, for it speaks to them of a past with its own validity, calling forth the ancestral spirit. Westernization through technology and economic circumstances, conquest and imperialism has affected the majority of black people on the African continent. There are very few untouched because of the advance of technology in our electronic age, bringing television and radio and so exposing them to the rest of the world. They are proving themselves remarkably quick to learn in everyway. A few who are untouched by civilization still retain a directness, thoroughly attractive with its down to earthiness.

The mother and grandmother play a very strong part in holding the family together while taking on work as well, particularly as nurses.  Like everywhere else they have become part of the negative influence of drugs, dishonesty with money and many still have to catch up with education and are doing very well under the circumstances. In the world of art, their hands have carved and continued to carve with a true creative spirit, extremely good sculpture today, especially in Zimbabwe, where they chisel away at natural soapstone.  The late Frank McEwan of the National Gallery promoted their sculpture, deservedly so, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Recently, on television, I watched an excellent programme in which the blind narrator on a visit to Zimbabwe from Britain, spoke as she felt stunningly beautiful, large sculptures in a public place. The documentary showed African women and men dancing round and near the sculptures, clapping their hands with joy.

My plea is for direct use of the hand by the artist. We lose contact with the feel of life by using our hands less and less; we lose the feel of the otherness of life through our hands.

The computer certainly is a marvel of invention but, with the keyboard, can bring all sorts of aches and pains to the wrist and stresses develop with over use. I suppose this can develop with too much chopping away with sculpture but not with using a simple needle. Great satisfaction comes with the use of the hand to make, to sculpt, to mould, to weave and write one’s own letter to friends, making somehow, with a warmth, the communication more personal.  The writing makes its own mark.  You see the writing, you think of the person automatically. Children, while automatically typing into the computer, must be taught to write clearly, making their letters, their script attractive, and well formed.

I have amongst my drawings in charcoal and pencil a series of hands playing musical instruments. Using pastels, I drew a series of hands playing, held together as a bud in yoga, hands that are coarse while making the opposite hands long and tapering and fine, the one often talking of hard physical work, the other of not much work. I have woven hands of musicians using threads to suggest through layers the physicality of the hands which impresses the importance of the hand upon the mind of the viewer.  For me today it speaks of mechanical man in my tapestries – robot man—reinvented man, pressing buttons, turning wheels while the physical feel is being enfeebled.

In 1972, when I was to hold my exhibition at the Prudhoe Gallery in Duke Street, central London, a friend of mine, very much into yoga, asked me to accompany her and her husband to a party given by the Editor of Connoisseur Art Magazine as she wanted me to meet the ‘right’ people in the art world, including art critics and connoisseurs.  She hoped they would take an interest in my work as an artist which she and her husband admired very much.  But fate intervened and it was not to be. Today, in fact, I see it with a sense of thankfulness, as that time I was concerned for my mother who was ill, and I felt that it was a protection for me and that I still had more to accomplish in my journey.  And that is exactly what happened. I had to develop further on the journey. With my interest in industrialisation, urbanisation and the sociological effects of technology, I bridged north to south (South Africa) with the theme of the individual becoming whole in the industrial, urban society. I created what I consider now to be my major work: The Lotus. It linked me more and more with my roots on a universal plane, giving the dimension of continuity to my daughters.  They loved their grandmother very much.  Her death had a deep affect on them.

The Lotus therefore represents many things for me. First and foremost my concern and love for my mother, which I can only say has a deep spiritual significance.  It also represents a spiritual and ecological rebirth at the time I was doing yoga. And it was my ‘third eye’ as an artist. The two large green hands set against a pink sky symbolize for me the planting of the earth with our hands, a celebration of the Earth. My mother’s last words as she lay dying were, after she woke from her afternoon sleep, ‘I dreamt I was with my friends in the country’ and she spelt the word out clearly COUNTRY and died. This message was passed on to me by the nurse looking after her. This was at a time when I was consumed in my work about our environment which I expressed in a series of large flowers and in the panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’. The latter, which stated simply, visualises man as a machine moving to completeness as a human being concerned with houses and housing, nutrition, healthy eating and the environment. Also the bio-physical which is the union of man and woman to give continuity. Seven panels, woven in London, bridged north to south, with three made in South Africa making ten panels.

Exhibiting in London in 1977 for the first time, the structure on which the seven panels hang is like a jewel in shape. In order to emphasize the diamond form of roundness with angles, correlating with my multifaceted work on many planes, it unfolds many dimensions. In the ‘Modern Mercies’ my jewel of panels link together with the concept of ‘no beginning, no end’, continuing like a circle.  They are numbered anticlockwise so that the seven seen in Roman letters, join together forming VIII (VII + I) which bridges three more to South Africa. The seven completed in London were seen with letters 1 to 7. The figures changed and the panel VIII Brown Machine Man, then IX Dreaming of Home, X ‘In the City’, and the ‘burning bush’, represented the brown and black peoples.  They relate to similar problems as the first seven panels involved with the loaves (panel IV) , and the fishes seen in panels II and V, housing and homes as in panels III and IX. Brown machine man (VIII) is on the same black and white chequerboard of life as panel I of ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’, interweaving inner and outer aspects of the human being who is becoming sophisticated in knowing the moves in the game of life. The series of panels, although woven in 1975-77, reaches its vision only in 2000, the millennium year when it will come into its own meaningfulness, the process of integration having begun in the seventies. The series of panels sets the human being on a path to fusion, echoing the needs of the individual today. In each panel I emphasize again that technology must come into balance.

It is obvious that numbers are very meaningful to me as they change from Arabic to Roman, each with their own significance  which make me appreciate, in a strange way, Warhol’s painting of numbers (1962), albeit the opposite of mine. Warhol could only see the demystification of numbers, mine being the complete opposite. His was an adaptation of a do-it-yourself painting, like a number cartoon for tapestry loom weavers which Saint Saens said was drying for the spirit.  Another ‘numbers’ painting very colourful in the ‘sixties’ but painted in a different spirit was  Jasper John’s ‘Numbers in Colour’ - a very rich beautiful aesthetic, saying something new, which has been painted to explore beauty.  For me, numbers have a mystery as a piece of music when I work in a series form, thinking as a musician of variations on a theme—the same theme explored in different ways. For instance the ‘burning bush’, a favourite symbol, is seen with thorns, then with buds of flowers, then in full bloom, using prickly pear, hard outside, soft inside.

I started to do miniature tapestries because, from a practical point of view, it is not so demanding on my fingers, which are not as agile with advancing years and is one of my reasons in taking up a pen to write this autobiography. One can always find space on the wall for a miniature which can unfold in dimension with another  variation. I can weave with my needle more, they are more affordable and are prized as collector’s items having been written about as such in the Financial Times twice, and from the Editor’s desk in the Antique Collector. There is an intimate quality in miniatures which equates with ‘small is beautiful’ advocated by the late Schumacher, the economist who wrote a book by that name.  It is applicable today with our problems of overpopulation, housing shortages and museums which are far too large and in which one gets lost and requires a map to negotiate all its passages and where perspective is lost on a crowded day. So thinking in terms of ‘small is beautiful’ regarding museums for art, I have always supported the small museum. I have been exhibiting at Leighton House over fifteen years and in Cape Town at the Irma Stern Museum, both small museums where a work of art can be contemplated. Similarly, I chose the unusual small spaces at the Universities and in my own individual way instead of earphones and tapes, instead of audio visual apparatus, I wrote notes which were always appreciated and were there to promote discussion. I came to Schumacher’s book by having an economist, Marilyn Carr, staying with me. She applied ‘intermediate technology philosophy’ in a practical way while working in the third world.  I am sure the book influenced my first two miniature tapestries which were ‘Roots’ and the ‘Burning bush’. Friends who bought my miniature tapestries say they often place their tapestries in their bedrooms because of the intimate quality.  This pleased me and I originally wrote in 1971: ’I want my tapestries to be like chamber music, warm and intimate, brought down in scale and size from the grand , the epic to  be enjoyed like a conversation amongst friends.’ I wanted them to be in a home as are paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, etc. where they give a certain pleasure through colour and texture in a domestic setting.

I represented the burning bush as the green prickly pear tree with, at various stages, the leaves covered with thorns, later flowers and still later fruit. That was the sequence chronologically in weaving this imagery. I made the light glow from the back through a flame representing the importance of light, symbolic of life, and the prickly pear was in a dark olive green and appeared black as the light glowed from behind  Each time I feel an injustice as there certainly was all around me in South Africa, I worked a ‘burning bush’ in counterpoint. The prickly pear grew in our garden in Bulawayo and was in a position where, with the glowing African sun in the background, it looked stunningly dramatic.  This was my inspiration. Two footprints of Moses, as described in the Old Testament, were imprinted in the foreground. He was told to take off his shoes as he stood on Holy ground. My sister Ruth and I had an unusual closeness. It was she who had discussed that the burning bush, which she knew was a strong symbol in my work, was often thought of in terms of the prickly pear, which was strong and tough outside but soft inside. From a personal point of view the symbol of the Burning Bush woven in the canvas was technically related to music with its light and shade and juxtaposing of contrasts though threads.. It was these qualities Mitsuko Uchida, the pianist, brought out in her rendering of Beethoven’s 32 variations on the theme of C major. I saw and felt the shadings in my own canvas as I listened to her interpretation.  The emphasis is on colour. In fact, I thought of the 32 variations when writing about the variations of the Burning Bush.

In 1968, I wove an abstract tapestry, I called ‘The Wind’.  It was woven in warm colours.  I mention this here because I discovered four years later, that I had woven into the right-hand corner, a portrait of my sister as a ‘bride’. I saw it suddenly as I sat in deep thought, thinking of my mother, who had just died.  I could not believe what my eyes saw for I had woven a head and shoulder portrait, just half her face with a teardrop forming by her right shoulder. It told me that I seemed to know that she was going to die. It told me of our close relationship.  It told me of my psychic gift then. Put simply, I seemed to know without knowing I knew, which sounds rather strange. I learned after this ‘happening’ that the wind in Hebrew is Ruach and it means ‘Spirit’. It came straight from the unconscious and has become part of my consciousness, linking us in a thread to each other.

Art, to be total, is not merely to show aesthetic qualities but also the ethical. The image is interwoven with huge areas of experience condensed with a symbol as in mathematics, in which I am no scholar. I merely understand how it works with the refining of the mind.

It was Jasna Buffacchi who invited me to exhibit at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg in 1991. She, like her brother, Igor Aleksander who wrote Reinventing Man, was born in Yugoslavia during the war years. Their parents fled with their children, landing in Perugia where their mother, who spoke several languages, was a translator although they did not speak English. They fled to South Africa where the lived unhappily with the apartheid system. Jasna had faith that in time the country would change for the better and built up a name for herself in the art world. The R.A University was connected to the Glencor Galleries, where I had an enormous exhibition. Her brother did not like South Africa because of the apartheid system. Nevertheless, he remained there while learning electrical engineering, moving from that to neuroscience, experimenting with robotics. Being a rebel to the system, he left and became a professor at Imperial College in London.

When I exhibited at the Rand Afrikaans University, Jasna learnt much about my unique approach regarding ‘man as machine’ and was especially aware of this in relation to her brother’s expertise in the field of making machines do the work of human beings. He builds machines that can work like the human brain with a network of neurons.

My brochure for the R.A.University exhibition said:

‘I believe imagination should be used as a means of coming to terms with reality and not as a means of perverting it into a channel for escape. As an artist, I feel I must take in a total environment of socio-economic forces as well as our physical environment with emphasis on nature. This includes an awareness of technology with the advance of scientific discoveries which brings mixed blessings.’

New learning through wider education including science, mathematics and computers to master machines will equally affect populations globally, leading to psychological and sociological problems. My imagery centres around the individual in transformation from the old to the new when there is always a rhythm of struggle and unity. I tried to indicate this in my major work of the panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’ which I brought to this exhibition, where I particularly focused on my series of  Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’.

Music like art is a universal language. It has no barriers and it is a lesson in relative values. As there is no light without shade, so there is no ‘forte’ without ‘piano’ with graduations of these qualities in an architectonic structure. This becomes more complex in polyphonic music when the many voices want to be heard. I have expressed these voices in my individualistic approach to visual music in the tapestries of the ‘Four Seasons’.

The brochure concludes:

‘The cycle of human development is a continuous process from generation to generation.  All growth is based on previous growth.  Hope comes through the fulfilment of the potential of an individual and continues with new beginnings in the birth of a child. I have tried to express this continuation of creation and perpetuation in the series ‘New Generation’, a few of which I have on exhibition in  Glencor Galleries with their large spaces. Opposite the ‘Four Seasons’ at one end of the central space are the series of the ‘Four Children of the Cross’. The child in the ‘Lotus’, which emerged in embryonic form in the circle of light and woven unconsciously, is the beginning of the new series.’

The 20th century has been marked by great developments with our Modern Age in art as well as sound. They interact and belong to each other in imagination and insight. It is not just a visual matter but also mental penetration giving vision. In art, the great names that emerge are Kandinsky and Picasso. The date of 1910 is important in art for Kandinsky, who painted his fist entirely non-representational works, greatly influenced by Monet.  Kandinsky interwove music into his paintings and wrote his treatise ‘Concerning the spiritual in art’ published in 1912. 

In science, the great scientific discoveries began in the 1920s with quantum theory, emphasizing that we are all participants in one world and interweave at different levels of consciousness with each other – we connect when we relate individually and also in a universal interconnectedness.  Scientists saw a new pattern at a subatomic level converging. The insight was that things material were not solid but had wavelike patterns of probabilities.  The thread in scientific discoveries continued with Einstein’s relativity theory, which led to the splitting of the atom, escalating new dimensions of energy of space and time.  The split in the physical world of the atom coincided with an accelerating split within the human pysche with the same paradoxes, relativities and multiplicities creating new energies through polarization in relationships. The exploration of the unconscious by Freud and Jung continues the thread, which had a profound effect on human consciousness.

It is obvious that creative imagination is the common quality of science and art. Science organizes our experience into laws through experimentation. Science is full of revealed wonders but there is so much that will unfold and we will learn more with the ascent of man whether it is to fight negative forces, such as pollution of the environment, or continue to promote the positive.

In art, we become one with the artist where there is communication with the work of art, shared on whatever level it functions with a human being. Not everyone will see the imagery in the same way.  This shared experience is always there, as long as it is related to truth of the creative spirit at the stage of development of the individual, from the child to more senior years. It is found from the beginning of time in the caves of the Bushmen and continues throughout time with evolving mankind.

In the next chapter, I discuss the medium of thread as a hybrid form.  There is repetition with expansion of the thread, bringing in other thoughts on my journey. And there is, as ever, movement backward and forwards in time. The past belongs to history from which we learn and gives perspective. The future gives hope.  The present is a gift which mythologises reality through the creative imagination. And, as ever, I write of tapestry.

CHAPTER II:  TAPESTRY, A NEW APPROACH THROUGH AN  AWARENESS OF THREADS

As an artist with a training in social anthropology, in music, dance and other general interests, especially a sort of compulsion about history, I have my doubts, like others of my generation, who grew in awareness through men such as Einstein, Freud, Jung and others identified in my introductory chapter. These giants of our 20th century, through their discoveries and mental acumen, have influenced me as I look backwards in time and forwards, projecting through my medium of threads, my web of life. I write from a highly personal and individual point of view with a vision which has isolated me from the general establishment. I obviously have had the support of friends, old and new, I met in my many exhibitions in Britain and South Africa, as well as in early days in Zimbabwe. I returned to live in London in 1964.

However, as an innovator of an atypical medium, and approach of woven images, I have been asked many questions and have had to give explanations continually. Begun in 1958, my approach is a fusion of old and new – a hybrid of craftsmanship and aesthetics of a painter. In response to an ever-increasing crescendo of questioning in these early years, in 1968, I answered briefly within a leaflet ‘Tapestry and Art: a new Approach’ (see 1960s)

The word ‘tapestry’ comes from the Greek work ‘tapas’, meaning ‘rug’ or woollen fabric’. It is defined as a weft of coloured wools or silks, forming designs or pictures, worked with a warp of hemp or linen in an interlacing action. The loom is usually used in weaving these two sets of elements. It can involve using the hands by manipulating the threads held in tension by the warp which, for me, is provided by the tapestry canvas of linen. Using both hands, I interlace threads placed horizontally across the canvas in layers. I use a needle which moves through the back and interlaces over the layered threads, acting as weft.

Working this way gave me a sense of playing the piano, creating a poetic conversation in my mind related to music, strands of which work in a counterpoint technique of light and shade. This is the strong basis of my structure. It is not just a technique of skilled handwork for craftsmanship involves cultivation of the mind which, when interwoven with the aesthetics of a painter, adds an extra dimension. The rapport I feel with music seems to share the same rhythms, have the same melodies, understand the same harmonies and dynamics. For melody forms the theme, rhythm gives movement and harmony chooses colours and textures intuitively and systematically, giving proportion through interweaving and organising space.

I use the same tools and materials as embroideries – and the mind must go back to 1958 when I began to express myself in this medium – but I have created from that moment a very different approach. I did actually start with the conventional tent stitch employed by embroiderers as far back as Tudor times, when it reached its height with what was known as ‘needlework craft’ in the seventeenth century. Embroidery, however, I saw then as a decorative use of stitches to adorn and enrich a material by manipulating needle and thread while emphasising the stitch. The beautiful clothes of Queen Elizabeth were enhanced by embroidery decorative work as were covers of cushions, stools and so forth, using the tent stitch. I very much admire the beauty of embroidery which in actual fact goes back into the mists of time to biblical days. In the Old Testament, weaving is often mentioned in Exodus, where instructions were given in a precise way for making hangings for the cover of the Tabernacle containing the Ark. We read in Exodus chapter 26:

‘ …and the gate of the court shall be a screen of 20 cubits of blue and purple and scarlet and fine twisted linen the work of the weaver…’

(By coincidence purple, scarlet and blue are the colours I use in my abstract tapestry of ‘Africa Emergent’, woven in 1965.)  Continuing the instructions, we read that 50 loops were to edge each curtain to fasten and form a tent of goat’s hair. Dyes of purple and red were obtained from shell fish, while red came from cochineal. Then again weaving is mentioned in the significant writings and descriptions of garments in Exodus Chapter 28. This is written for Aaron the priest:

‘And thou shalt make garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty…..and these are the garments thou shalt make: a breastplate and an ephod and a robe and a embroidered coat, a mitre and a girdle….. and they shall take the gold and blue and purple and scarlet and make the ephod of these colours and on fine twisted linen.’

In 1980, having read these significant writings and descriptions of garments to be woven, I wove the ‘Girl with the Pomegranates’.  Now at the end of the 20th century, the priest became a priestess.  The colours to be used were followed as closely as possible – scarlet, purple, blue and gold as well as bells and pomegranates on the skirt. The ephod with jewels was to represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

‘All interwove with the covenant of the ark to be brought to Jerusalem.’ I had visited Jerusalem in 1977and had woven a series as a result of the visit. This included several of the red curtain in front of the Ark and the pink stone which so impressed me. I placed ‘The Girl with the Pomegranates’ in front of a red curtained Ark and the chequerboard of life to represent the young women of today who, like the knight, has to learn the game of life and what moves to make. I stress through the Ark the ethic but also hint at the liberating force of the game of life – unfolding knowledge interwoven with experience. Aesthetically the tapestry was also inspired by the nativity painting by Piero della Francesca which I saw at the National Gallery. The whole image spoke to me on many levels, and is part of my ‘New Generation’ series.

My own creativity has created a new vocabulary. My imagination gained impetus in rebelling against the dominance of the stitch. My mother had taught me tent stitch. Her chair covers with their Victorian patterns of tightly graded colours were placed on our antique furniture. While I continued to paint, my early tapestry technique passed through three stages of development during four to five years of experimentation. This was from 1958-62, as historically in tune with world events which always influence my imagery, the Russians sent a cosmonaut into space. I felt I was beginning to achieve in this medium of expression to which I was devoted and it took over from my oil painting.

Technically I moved from a smooth surface, much influenced by texture as well as colour, when I initially employed tent stitch, producing a precise machine-like surface, to a more modulated surface. I did this by placing threads across the canvas and no longer used tent stitch – my major invention in technique. In time, I interwove not only new surfaces but also forms with new ideas and concepts, working as ever with a new individual approach in splitting threads and using crewel wools and contrasting textures.

A new form was the semi-sculputural ‘Child in the Moses Basket’, influenced by the African mask. My first tapestry influenced by the African mask was the large ‘Ancient and Modern Faces’ (5 x 3 ft), worked in three layers, one on top of the other, decreasing in size as the layers covered the original base. The influence of the mask is from Bulawayo days in Rhodesia. The layers were filled with rubber foam to create hollows and bumps. It was a foot in depth with a fringe of coarse threads, which include camel hair and tweed. I worked on it, weaving and sculpting in 1972, after my return from my exhibition in Venice at the Bevilacqua La Masa gallery in the Piazza San Marco. It was influenced by the Mouth of Truth that I saw in Palazzio Ducale. At the time my mind was occupied with thoughts of Cape Town, where my tapestries were being exhibited with SA tapestry artists at the South African National Gallery, but in a separate room from the rest.

Included in this exhibition was ‘Mandela’, which is symbolic of wholeness and reminiscent of Nelson Mandela, head of the ANC government. Other tapestries included were ‘Burning Bush’ presented to the Department of African Studies and hung in the Department of African Studies and later in the Jaeger Library, from which it mysteriously disappeared. Included as well was ‘Coat of Many Colours’ owned by Dr and Mrs Sutin, now living in New York, ‘Electric Grey Man No 1. (1967) owned by Jack Leibowitz, now living with his family in Milton Keynes. They have travelled a far way with their owners who left South Africa with change of the political scene, then extremely disturbing under apartheid. The tapestries were sent on tour to the main art galleries in South Africa, gaining a certain status for my innovative approach. In contrast to myself, the South African painters were held in high esteem in South Africa for their paintings. For their tapestries, they made cartoons for loom weavers and there their creative art interwoven with tapestry ended. Some were more directly involved with few original ideas. Dr Bokhorst faithfully placed my tapestries in a room on their own giving them a special recognition.

In 1973 my mother died; her death was interwoven with rebirth for me and the completion of my ‘Lotus’ tapestry on which I was working at the time. The symbol of replanting the earth, I continued to weave ‘my tree, inside and outside’ into which I unconsciously wove the faces of nuns (two different views and a monk). After  the ‘Lotus’ and the ‘Tree’, I wove flowers, which included a yellow rose, a tulip, two large daisies, a protea, a tiger lily and others which were all individually scaled down in size, but all much larger than the way I work in miniature form with threads today. They placed a strong accent on the importance of nature and were representative of a flowering in my work, as well as in the way I illustrated relativity. In 1975, I began my ‘Modern Mercies’ series which began with panel I, ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’ and quite unknown to me then, were to develop into the ten panels.

In 1977, in my brochure for my first exhibition at Leighton House, I wrote:

‘The whole of my work is based on an analogy within my mind of a canvas of life in which all creatures form part of a cosmic whole of positive and negative forces. Plants, animals, human beings interweave, act and interact at varying levels like threads in a tapestry. Stitches are like ’atoms’ forming part of a whole, but just as atoms are invisible to the human eye, so stitches must be unstitchlike and remain hidden. They become more noticeable as part of surface textures. In using threads, I am aware that each thread, however small, retains its own identity within the whole yet merges like paint.’

It was in this exhibition that I exhibited the ‘Modern Mercies’ on a specially built seven-sided structure for the first time.

In the 1960s, while working on long panels of ‘Man and Machine’, I also experimented with a more complex technique, working in depth, creating abstract tapestries with a fractal aesthetic. In my 1977 brochure, I had written ‘One of my reasons for putting down my brush to take up needle and threads in 1958 was because I questioned the use of paint for abstract imagery’. I believed paint could not create the depths implicit in abstract art because of the quality of light reflection of paint which is thrown off the canvas.

I wrote:

‘Paint usually requires a coat of varnish to bring out its fullness of colour and varnish can give rise to too much reflection from the paint surface. [I was painting in oils at the time.] Abstract art by its fullness of concept demands a luminosity that relates not just to surface modulations of light but reaches into intangible textures on other planes.’

In my mind when writing this, I thought of my ‘Still Point’ (1968) because of the way in which I had structured it with opposite textures and colours to create shadows.

My other abstract tapestries or, as I prefer to think of them, semi-abstract because they always relate to the concrete, were worked in layers. The layers were overlaid with loops of threads to catch them together and hold in place. Over that, loops, not stitches, cascaded downwards, creating a density of texture and tone. The shapes of the canvases were rectilinear, long, round, cradle-shaped and oval, and included a butterfly and a double-sided three dimensional bat which hung from the ceiling and turned in a rotating movement with the airflow.

I then turned my thoughts to a smaller world. As I began to work on a small scale in miniatures, I, in counter to large and long sweeps of thread, worked with small short threads in what I called a miniaturized technique.

In 1977, while on an extended stay in Cape Town, I was given an abalone shell and was moved by the beauty of its shape and iridescence.  I saw it as a symbol of organic wholeness – its outside and inside.  In the spiral of the shell, I saw the beginnings of the structural principles of nature — a symbol of growth. I then worked upon a series of seven small tapestries related to light falling on this shell and examined it under a magnifying glass at different times of the day. Next to the sea in Bantry Bay where I had my home, the light sparkled with a brilliance I had not seen before and I examined this light on the abalone shell everyday. I learned about reflected light, saw its beauty and used the full spectrum of the rainbow while colours became softer. It became an exercise in a carefully balanced interplay of light and colours of each minute thread placed in relationship to each other in a microcosmic world.

The series of seven consisted of:  the whole shell, then a pair consisting of the outside and the inside focusing on the spiral, then the lip of the shell, part of the lip and part of the porous smaller sections, and lastly part of that smaller section, amoeba-like in shape, a total blow up, very iridescent.

I have also applied this miniaturized technique in a more decorative way for ‘house and housing’, not only for their beauty and interest architecturally but for social concern. My buildings’ interior and exterior were mentioned by the editor of the Antique Collector for my Leighton House exhibition in 1991-92.  It was extremely encouraging, especially as I did not place an advertisment. He just liked them.

My buildings include the Victorian, showing change as, despite the chimneys, they herald the 20th century architecturally. The part of Kensington in which I live is rich in history through architectural changes. I sat in my car and sketched the outward appearance, usually reflecting seasonal changes in gardens, especially the trees coming into season or losing their leaves – the plane trees that line Abbotsbury Road, where I walk every day. The plane trees were planted in Victorian times because they were tough and could withstand the grimy air of the time, with the smoke coming out of the chimneys. There are plenty of chimneys to be seen in the buildings I pass, especially in the Oakwood Court complex, and I have woven these into my houses’ images. It is no wonder that the committee concerned with clean air have advised on the planting of plane trees in a square in Kensington where there is plenty of pollution from the traffic.

In my imagery of houses woven into miniature tapestries, I tried to show continuity into the 20th century as the straight line took over from the detail and curves of the late Victorian buildings in Kensington, which include Leighton House, the Tower House, Richmond House, the old Kensington Tavern pub, the Orangerie in Holland Park, the artists’ studios behind Leighton House designed by Norman Shaw, and flats opposite, seen from my window.

In the nineties’, I wove miniatures of Cape Dutch architecture, of the Malay Quarter and the African townships. In 1995 and 1996, I sketched the interior of the Irma Stern Museum lounge which I wove into miniature tapestries using the short threads technique.  The sketches were made within half an hour and I remembered the colours as I wove. I called the first one: ‘Corner of Lounge’ where in contrast to exotic old European colourful chairs, Irma Stern had well displayed the primitive masks of bark cloth she had found on her travel, which had taken her as far as Zanzibar. The second miniature was ‘Looking out at the garden’ and was by another extraordinary high-backed chair, next to a most unusual, colourful door that she had decorated with faces.

A more medium-sized tapestry was ‘Homes, Housing and Technology’, showing traditional huts, their humble homes, and in contrast, modern skyscraper-like buildings in a less definite outline reaching into the sky. In the foreground, using artificial threads with old Elizabethan metallic threads, I built up an agglomeration of shanty town ghettoes found in the African townships. The head of African technological man dominates the canvas, suggestive of ‘man as machine’ affected by industrialization. The black man’s life changed at the beginning of the century when he had to pay taxes.  This had the effect of absorbing him into the money economy with a drift to the cities reminiscent of the agrarian and industrial revolution occurring in Britain a century earlier, which brought bridges, steam trains and a new way of life as the arts and crafts movement began to flower.

A few pages back, I mentioned the semi-sculptural forms of ‘Ancient and Modern Faces’ using hairy and coarse wools and worked in earthy African brown colours. I contrasted it with semi-sculptural, smaller tapestry of the ‘Child in the Moses basket’ in which I used more cotton silks to catch the light. I did this deliberately for I worked upon this tapestry in Cape Town at a later time, six years later in 1978. I was reflecting what I felt regarding the light around me in Cape Town and about the people.  The idea came to me one day as I looked across the studio room of my sunny flat and then in my large Moses basket woven by Africans. I imagined and thought up this tapestry cradling a brown baby girl. I was always struck by the role of African women in relation to their children and particularly the grandmother who gave such stability and love to her family. I saw it every day as Gladys, who with her husband Abe (our caretaker), lived in a flat near mine with their grandchildren. She cared for me because of my diabetic condition and checked every day in the early morning to see if I was alright.  A nurse by training, I employed her for that purpose and many a time, she came just in time.

I worked in layers of canvas again. A base shell-like shape was the first layer of canvas. On top of this layer, I placed the basket shape which I slit at the top and shaped into the form of the baby and a basket by filling it with foam rubber. It took a good deal of manipulation, not only to fill out the form of the child but the basket.  Before placing it on the base, I wove into it cotton silks as well as crewel wools in basket colours of light yellows and, having completed this layer, I sewed it onto the base with brown, bark colours at the bottom and iridescent rainbow colours at the top.  For me the black child was a girl covered in a pink blanket; the rainbow child who looked up to the light of shining colours as in a shell. I named the baby Nicola for she represented the little girl born to the caretaker’s daughter. She was cleaning my flat at this time and was pregnant. So I identified her with the girl baby whom she gave birth to and whom she named Nicola, the name of my own granddaughter who had a twin, Natalie. The complexity of coincidences continued when Nicola had a sister Natasha a few years later. The children came to me constantly and as they grew up, I helped them with their school work. We had a good time together in my flat in the apartment building, A1 Nevada, in Bantry Bay on the sea. At the back of the tapestry when completed with hessian backing, I wrote ‘You are dark but were given the light’.

This tapestry dominated the entrance to the gallery at the top of the stairs of the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town at my 1996 exhibition. The Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology of the new South African government, Mrs Brigitte Mabandla, a lawyer, opened it. She took over from Winnie Mandela at the moment I was in Cape Town earlier, and it was a fortuitous moment to ask her whether she would be able to open my exhibition, which I had just arranged for 1996. Being in Cape Town, I switched on the radio one lunchtime, just at the right moment to hear what I expected to be the news and magically heard her being interviewed on a radio arts  programme in which I discovered she was interested in human rights. By coincidence, I had sold an ‘African tree’ miniature to the founder of the human rights newsletter which was a tie with Mrs Mabandla, Deputy Minister of Art, Culture, Science and Technology, which are my areas of interest. So I had an instant communication with her. It had its validity because, trained as a social anthropologist, my fields of speciality gained me knowledge of the effects of industrialisation, native law and administration, urbanisation and technology, which I reflected in my panels of the Modern Mercies which I intended to bring to the Irma Stern Museum. I brought a model of all ten panels and the actual panels VIII, IX and X which join with Southern Africa, as stated in the brochure.

Before proceeding to write about the opening of my Irma Stern Museum exhibition, I would like to mention what I learned when training as a social anthropologist. For my fifth year at University while working for my MA degree, I studied native law and administration under Dr Harry Simons, world renowned as part of the anti-apartheid campaign which made him leave South Africa to live in Kenya with his wife, in order to avoid arrest.  He spoke so loudly and defiantly, as well as truthfully, to the apartheid national government in power against which he stood.  The obituary written in 1995 in The Guardian (London) in praise of his celebrated life, evoked a sadness mixed with the same feelings of admiration for his belief in social justice. He practised it and did not only teach it.  While scratching around in my old note book of these long distant days, I found the following notes which continue to influence me as an artist so many years later. This is evident from the writings in my brochure on industrialization, urbaniziation and technology in which I compare the shape of my work to sonata form in music. I quote here verbatim from notes on the migratory labour system and its social consequences. This system is mentioned in my writings referred to briefly in my article ‘Handwoven Tapestries on Canvas’ dealing with my concerns about the life of people in industrial societies (published in Britain 1981).

‘Long separation of husband and wife results in unfaithfulness of both husband and wife. This well nigh inexhaustible supply of cheap labour had made it easy for great enterprises to be carried out with the maximum profit to the white employers but little to the African wage earner. The system cannot be other than ephemeral. Firstly, it is not possible for the social structure of the tribe to be sustained in the permanent absence of up to 50% of its adult population. The most important unit in tribal organizations is the family. It is broken up with devastating tribal consequences. The disintegration of the family group is a major social disaster for as we know broken homes causes a great many serious social problems as adultery, desertion, prostitution and crime generally as the relations between husband and wife deteriorate.

In the towns, the husband, in the absence of his wife, forms temporary illegal unions and consequently there is an increase in illegitimate children. (Sounds familiar today in Britain, except there is greater toleration and a new language of partners and this is thousands of years after the ten commandments as guidelines to decent responsible behaviour were introduced). At home it results often with the wife living with a temporary husband. On a man’s return home he finds it difficult to build again a new life. His place of authority which during his absence he relinquished to his wife or eldest son, is no longer recognized to its former extent. He has lost his traditionally dominant position in the household and no longer commands the respect and dignity of former days. His wife who, during his absence, enjoyed much freedom as well as a greater domestic responsibility, no longer yields so readily to his wishes or commands on his return (a very patriarchal society although the Swazi have a special status for their mother Queen). The maternal discord that exists is by no means a good example to the children who resent being ordered around. They resent fulfilling his commands and [there is an] altogether unhealthy relationship between mother and father and between father and children. The disordered life of the migratory system has serious consequences.’

There was a last minute hitch regarding the opening of my exhibition at the Irma Stern Gallery. I heard a radio announcement at three in the afternoon that Nelson Mandela had called a meeting suddenly for MPs to be in Parliament at six o’clock. That was the time of the opening. Mandela called parliament to announce the resignation of the Finance Minister, a cabinet reshuffle, the appointment of a new minister and increased the number of women in his cabinet. Fortunately, Mrs Mabandla did not lose her cabinet post, but the rand fell in value and I wondered whether she would make the opening. Then the curator heard that she intended coming as and when she could, but much later. I was in quite an emotional state, but tried to take things philosophically. It had happened to me like a recurring pattern on about every occasion of important exhibitions. In 1973, my mother died as my Prudhoe exhibition in Duke Street closed. In fact it was the very moment as I was about to attend a party given by Connisseur magazine. It had happened in Venice just after the opening of the Bevilacqua La Masa. Because of a fight between the Marxist director of the gallery and the head of the Arts Council, the director closed the big black doors of the gallery to end the exhibition after two days, and it happened at Leighton House in 1981. There my exhibition opened 6th December, a day after John Lennon was shot in New York, having announced he was more famous than Jesus Christ, and there was the biggest pouring of heavy snow making the roads impassable. It lasted the duration of the exhibition, cancelling all my important opportunities.

However, my fortune changed the night of 28th March 1996, when eventually, after seven o’clock that evening, Mrs Mabandla arrived well protected by her bodyguard and Alsatian dogs. It was such a memorable occasion. Clothed in a black dress patterned with African drums, she presented a rich picture of the potential of African textiles as well as our awareness and pride in this heritage.  Everyone had waited with patience. There was a very special atmosphere and I was greatly moved by the loyalty of friends on this special occasion. However, they were well supplied with food and special Cape wine which they imbibed out of doors in the lovely setting of the lush garden surrounding the Irma Stern Museum. It was quite unique, especially with my family who had just arrived from London.

Perhaps one of the most important points I have made in discussing technique is emphasising that the ‘stitch’ must be ‘unstitchlike’. I stopped thinking in stitches as soon as I applied my threads into a warp/weft horizontal weave and as the cultivation of my mind grew in relation to my new hybrid medium of tapestry interwoven with the aesthetics of a painter. I moved on my journey with new ideas. However, there are important historical embroideries I must mention because of their significance. The outstanding example of which is the Bayeux Tapestry.

I first worked on a long trestle table, but now use an architect’s table made by a blind man from St Dunstans in Cape Town. On this I place difference sized soft boards into which pins can easily press. I did, in the 1960s’, work on the floor, looking down on my work and around which I could walk. At the end of the 60s, I had to get up from this working position where I worked surrounded by baskets of wools, and work at a table.

Referring to the Bayeux Tapestry, it is a unique pictorial record – a function of art – of medieval history. The tapestry was made in the 11th century for the town of Bayeux. It depicts the events leading up to the victory of the Norman invaders under William the Conquerer over the Anglo-Saxon Army under King Harold of Hastings in 1066, a very famous date.  The embroidery is 230 feet long and stands alone at the end of the Dark Ages. There is a curious air of vitality of artistic knowledge in composition, minute detail interwoven in a feeling of wholeness and contrasting scenes.  Housed in Bayeux today, it highlights a turning point in English history into a more enlightened age. The colours that seem to dominate are dark bluey-greens, tans and light beige-browns, giving the dress of the time when men wore tunics. It is very interesting, especially the detail of Halley’s comet which turned up in the sky then, these celestial happenings always regarded with significance. Human beings always want to record their history.

Near our time, I know of the Rhodesian tapestry but now, more significantly, it is motivated by the interest of women, humble enough to hold a needle and thread in their hand and adept at it. It was referred to as a History of Needlework and embroidered by Womens’ Institutes. In the book published about it, we are told that the warp had been furnished by the nature of her soils, the structure of her rocks, the course of her rivers, the shape of her hills, giving the whole geography of this vast land all woven into the tapestry made up of panels sewn together (42 panels in all).  It hangs as it hung, for a very different government, in the House of Parliament today.

The work was carried out after the war in 1946 when Lady Tait, the governor’s wife, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, asked the Women’s Institute to do this. It is worked on linen, revealing the clothes worn and colours used as well as the threads of imported silks from Switzerland. As South-Central Africa appears to have been the cradle of mankind and goes back centuries to represent bushmen in the embroidery worked by black women. Pictures of it reveal beautiful details of flowers, of African art objects, of animals, of all life, including slaves.

I conclude this chapter as I began it, writing about embroidery.  In the 60s I was earning a reputation for myself from certain embroiderers who took note of my tapestries. I was also well known in the Craft Council, taking part in their important exhibitions, especially the one in June 1973, as well as the V&A exhibition two months before that called the Craftsman’s Art.  Diana Springall, who established her reputation as a Lecturer in Embroidery at Stockwell College of Education in the 60s, asked me to loan my tapestry ‘Cosmic Energy’ for her students to see and asked for transparencies to be printed in colour and in black and white, which were in her book Canvas Embroidery. In 1969, I gave her the ‘Movement of water’ (in colour) and on another page she printed in black and white ‘Machine Man’ from my triptych ‘Man’, which I was also asked to send to Leicester College which I did. Alongside ‘Machine Man’ was a blow-up of the threads I used.  This photograph was seen by the head of the Metallurgic Institute in Budapest, Hungary, who became very excited when he saw the photograph as he said it looked like photographs of the metal for fusion, titanium. He took it to the Russian embassy and brought a man from the Embassy to see me. He was indignant that I did not have greater recognition for my work in this country. He seemed very fascinated about my approach and made all sorts of suggestions about my exhibiting in his part of the world which I ignored. This occurred in 1979 just as I completed my largest tapestry ‘Lotus’ after my mother’s death.

CHAPTER III: IDEAS, CONCEPTS, TECHNOLOGY and TRANSFORMATION at a time of INDUSTRIALIZATION with THREADS of MUSIC and DANCE

As the title of this chapter informs, it is devoted to placing emphasis on my ideas and concepts interwoven with technology and transformation in a time of industrialization which begins with Hargreaves’ spinning jenny at the end of the 18th Century.

In weaving tapestries in a series, I see a theme unfolding in time like a long symphony or concerto.  Tapestries woven in a series were not planned as such. What is very important regarding my tapestries is they grow organically, interweaving with new experiences, forming a chain in imagery and ideas which sometimes take years to evolve.  This is how ‘Transformation – Ancient and Modern Faces’ develops into a series; I wove ‘Ancient Man’ in 1972 (size 20 x 20 inches) after my visit to Cape Town when my work began to bridge with South Africa.  It was my first attempt at a semi-sculptural form influenced by the African mask in a small form.  I must stress that the emphasis this time is on the small form and not to be mistaken for the large tapestry of ‘Ancient and Modern Faces’ already written about more fully in Chapter 1.  At almost the same time, I wove ‘Modern Man with a bow-tie’ (also 20 x 20 inches).

On the canvas, the image emerged from a television screen as I thought of a well-known presenter of that time. I caused much amusement to those who saw the image and recognized Robin Day, especially his bow-tie.  He is still around, but not so famous in 1988. A third small canvas in this series ‘Woman Emerging from a Cage’ with a chain necklace around her neck, completed the series, or so I thought.  However, many years later on 11th February 1991, I arrived in Johannesburg from London and saw on television a great occasion as Nelson Mandela became a free man.  At his side was his wife, Winnie, looking devoted and very happy, despite rumours circulating as to the contrary, accompanied by her practice of tyre ‘necklacing’.  Again, the television screen was imprinted on my mind and I began to weave a second ‘Modern Man Communicating through Technology’ almost 20 years after the first.  I wove his face, a rather attractive portrait, of a brown-skinned (dark) man with greying hair, his face emerging from the TV screen surrounded by microphones.  He became a star on the global stage.  This series was completed with a semi-sculptural tapestry I named ‘Woman Long, Long Ago’, showing a rather full-mouthed, coarse-haired, black, beautiful woman.  Her name was not Winnie.  I preferred this image to the woman at his side that day.  Had I woven her shoulders and head, I would have surrounded the screen with a tyre.  Finally to the series, I added a butterfly, as a symbol of transformation.  That is how my creativity continued to interweave even many years later to form part of a series – a theme – to which I kept adding. 

The first time I exhibited these tapestries as a series was at my Irma Stern Museum exhibition in 1996 in Cape Town.  The series forming a set has now been broken up with the purchase of ‘Woman Long Long Ago’ in London this year (1998) so that ‘Modern Man Communicating through Technology’, which is a portrait of Nelson Mandela, I had hoped to exhibit at my exhibition at the New Cape Gallery in March.  Unfortunately, because of the fall in the value of the Rand to the pound, the exhibition was cancelled for the time being but will be part of an exhibition at the Cape Gallery, including seven artists in 1999 in March. [This did not happen.]

Moving back to 1975 when I wove my series of the panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’, I began with ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’.  This became panel I of my ten panels.  Unplanned as such, it grew organically into seven panels and was exhibited on a seven-sided structure.  Then to the seven, three more panels were added in a bridging process with South Africa, which took six more years.  Back to 1975, however, when the image of ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’ came to my mind as I crossed the Hammersmith Bridge on my way home from Kingston through Richmond Park.  The lines of the bridge can be seen in the long panel as the machine figure strides across, with the outlines of wings in reverse shape to the bridge to complete the design. They are the wings of imagination interwoven with discontent.  Across his body is a digital battery.  The body is covered with undulating curves which were, as I moved my hand, intended to be economics graphs – money suddenly became the curves of hills.  I imagined I saw nature taking over as my colours became varying greens of the countryside, saying something about the environment.  I had just sold the last of my ‘Electronic grey man’ panels woven in the ‘60s, alongside the abstract tapestries I wove simultaneously.  This was followed by ‘Electronic Grey Man II’ depicting a machine figure with a ball and chain. 

In the 70s, having completed ‘Knight Crossing the Bridge’, the first panel of the ‘Modern Mercies’, this was followed by panel II emphasising the hills and landscape, the water with the beginnings of fish forming in the body.  This happened at a time when I started to do Tai Chi, good for the health while opening up the chakras of which there are seven down the spine.  The chakras are energy centres.  The movement is slow and contained.  I loved to do Tai Chi and move in its rhythm as the symbols spoke to me in a meditative way.  It involved the whole body in the ying yang flow of mind and body.  Tai chi has beautiful hand movements and connected me to the earth through my feet from which I felt the energy flow.  It connected with an awareness that the individual has to bridge inner and outer worlds.  So began my ‘Modern Mercies’ two years later when I was still practising it.  In it, you are told to go down to the water, evoking thoughts of fish.

Man is a social animal and has outer and inner needs.  The outer needs which the individual must satisfy in order to continue, relate to shelter expressed through the image of the house, especially housing as in panel III, further ‘Dreaming of Houses’ which is panel IX reflecting the same need of a house.  Also nutrition – the need for healthy food as in panels II and V, as fish form in the body of the Knight, and the ‘biophysical’ – the environment.  This must be a healthy and pleasant one with good clean air, clean water and a fertile earth.  This is a dream to be realized if we are to survive, but which involves tremendous complications.  A continuum as a family which begins with the union of male and female is included within the biophysical context.  Inner needs are pyschological and spiritual.  The ten panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’ are concerned with this and show that a bridge must be formed between inner and outer needs to give completeness to the human being.  A complete individual leads to a whole society with greater understanding of each other, regardless of colour or religion.  So that in the process of creating, understanding and intuition merge with imagination.

I particularly emphasise industrialization with special reference to the mixed blessings technology brings in our contemporary times, because technology has so evolved and the human being similarly must evolve in awareness to be like a ‘knight’ male and female to give service in a riddled with problems and  materialism.

Regarding the environment, there is a conflict here between consumerism, the earning of a living and polluting our sea, earth and air.  Ask anyone who now suffers from asthma or from chest infections, how the poor quality of air affects them.  They cannot ride their bicycles without protective gear. Many cannot go about their daily business without inhalers.

There are, in other words, two sides to this coin with earners and consumers.  Both must be involved.  In the industrial production of commodities, especially in western society where there is more wealth with a more comfortable standard of living, there is democracy which gives more freedom.  So with a trend away from authoritarian control, the problem is double edged.  Because of democracy, groups such as those interested in biodiversity in favour of a life support system for all life, from the smallest creatures such as birds and fish, exist to counter this.  Their advocacy takes the form of a protest to ban drift-netting, to stop fish becoming caught up in these nets, thereby depleting fish stocks,  This is obvious already in the North Sea where fish are disappearing, the problem being made worse through pollution caused by the oil rigs, but necessary as a source of energy.  Then again, birds apart from their attractive quality of song adding an enjoyment to life, need to eat cereals as does much wild life, and come into conflict with farmers who have to preserve their crops and so set traps and other means of chasing away birds which have become rare.  There is an interdependence of life which needs animals to keep the health of the soil, starting from small creatures such as earthworms.  The soil has a complex labyrinth of microbes of fungi, bacteria, viruses which microbiologists understand.  As a lay person, however, I do know that the more you throw into your compost heap, as I did when I had a garden in Bulawayo, the more it will team with life.  It includes everything that is rotting, all leftovers and cut vegetable skins as well as manure especially from horses.  Understanding this and trying to avoid artificial chemicals in fertilsers may even help in understanding disease.  The importance of the top layer of the Earth’s crust is vital for our survival which the World Health Organisaton is giving great attention to, be it on land or sea.

One of the answers to these environmental problems is the need to educate children who will live their lives in the next century and we need to look ahead at a growing problem by placing emphasis on responsible use of natural resources for the general wellbeing of mankind.  In this regard, I as an artist, continually weave flowers, tree, animals as well as paint and draw in different ways to celebrate creation and draw attention to their beauty through colours, textures and interesting shapes. I treat nature with respect especially as it has extraordinary medicinal and creative powers.  We have a lot to learn from so-called under-developed peoples who still use plant life for their curative powers, knowing their secrets through usage. 

As mother earth is my most potent symbol with my concern for the environment, I write here about the extraordinary perception of the Native American Indians in relation to their understanding and respect for the earth.  The gave warnings, especially in the 70s, that it was up to the people of the word to take action against some very negative patterns – such as cycles of weather patterns - manifesting.  Their warning was to take action to restore a higher quality of life, not solely in terms of gross national product or consumption, but rather in the quality of their air, water and soil, producing food and the satisfaction an individual would have in a job;  things that are not readily identifiable in terms of a quantitative economic value.  Awareness of this caring for the earth brings to mind  what Chief Seattle wrote in his testimony in 1854 to the President, who wanted to buy their land.  To quote:

‘How can you buy or sell the clay, the warmth of the land?  The idea is strange to us.  Every part of this earth is sacred to my people’.

He continues in some eleven pages eulogising about the Earth and it is well worth reading what he says.  I shall give just a few lines:

‘The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath.  The white man does not spare time to notice the air he breathes.  Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.  But if we sell you our land, you remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.  The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh.  And the wind must also give our children the spirit of life.  And if we sell you our land you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is awakened by the meadow’s flowers.’

Sheer poetry that lives on through the generations despite what has happened to the Native American Indians today who spoke of Mother Earth and the material considerations of earning a living.

My concern for the environment for Mother Earth, I have expressed in my most potent image of the ‘Weeping Sun’ in yellow golds and purple blues, woven in 1970.  The image shows tear drops running out of the sun with a strong spiral forming in it.  It was woven in 1970 on reading John Milton’s warning against censorship in the few lines quoted in his Areopagitica, 1644:

‘We boast our light, but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness … The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever starting on, but by it to discover onwards things more remote from our knowledge.’

At the time, the metaphor of the union of opposites wove sorrow with joy as a plea for creative thoughts about our environment. 

Nature and art have this in common - a form comes into existence by the union of opposites.  The one is reality, the other illusion which to have a reality involving depth must relate to natural principles.  The general rule is male and female create a new life in nature.

In art, two opposite states of being are needed to create a form, the active and receptive must alternate to produce a complete work.  Within the individual are opposite states: apart from the male-female principles, these are the rational and intuitive. In Chinese philosophy there are the interconnected forces of the active and passive known as yin yang in which there is a possible correspondence between the structural patterns of the physical world and structural needs of the human mind within the individual related to survival.

Each culture has its own legends regarding trees and ancestral spirits.  Each has it own character moulded by the environment and by time.  In Zimbabwe, the bundu tree with its twisted trunk became for me a symbol of strength and life as its dried-out trunk twisted in a struggle for survival. The bundu tree has no straight path upwards like the lonely pine to heaven.  It must meet the challenge of its harsh environment in the bush where there is little water and much sun.  The trunk is twisted, gnarled and deeply scarred from this struggle.  Often its roots burst right out of the earth.  Like the prickly pear, which became my ‘burning bush’ in some ten tapestries of various sizes, it is well protected by thorns.  It did, in some works, grow and develop as a symbol of bearing flaming flowers and in others, fruit sweet to eat.

The forests are the lungs of the earth.  Trees are being cut down by developers for commercial reasons to make furniture or other reasons or just to make a fire to give warmth to people who have no electricity.  It depends on where you live and accordingly your needs.  The lungs of the earth are mainly in the Congo Basin in Africa and in Brazil in the Amazon.  These are the largest areas for forests in the world, but large and smaller forests are all over the world, inviting human exploitation. I have stressed the interconnectedness of life within forests, which give shelter to animals, intertwined with plant life giving food to animals as well as man. Prince Philip signed a charter to protect the forests of the Cameroons in the Congo basin where the Lundi people live. As a journalist was reporting this, he observed logs 30 feet long by ten feet wide being transported in truck loads, leading to furniture factories. Whether the charter will be obeyed is another matter, but it has been established as law now.

I believe the artist must go to nature to observe not only outward forms but also the dynamic, the movement behind life.  Nature has been somewhat neglected by artists today.  Growing up in Cape Town, being by the sea, filled me with an awareness of nature in all its beauty and I acquired when very young what Carl Jung called archetypes of trees, flowers, stones, rocks which never left me.  But it was in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that I observed in depth the minutiae of the bush, where I experienced unending space and the spiral of all abounding energy.  Through understanding the principles of organic growth which must be slow, we become transformed as we link In the mind the cycles of birth and death with regeneration of which the tree is the most potent symbol.

So I recall that in 1974, I wove a tapestry of a tree referred to in Chapter I called ‘Tree, Inside and Outside’, I placed a tree form of a trunk centrally on my canvas out of which two branches grew, looking like arms.  In the middle of the arms I had an oval shape of sliced wood which looked like a head – the head of a hanging figure with upstretched arms. Without knowing, I had done this, I discovered that I had woven in the head, three distinct faces of two nuns and a monk. The whole tree form was placed on a background of a structure of growing rings, manifesting age in rich yellow wood, patterns of life forming in layers of space and time.  The colours are in yellows, browns and light beiges.  This represents the yellow wood tree only found in South Africa in the Cape and furniture made of this rare wood are today much valued.  The wood darkens with age and becomes a rich honey colour.  It is protected today and is very difficult to come by although I had furniture made from it for my flat in Nevada in the 1970s. 

We learn much about mathematics from trees, especially about branching structures, balance and proportion.  From its trunk with branches growing into smaller and smaller branches with twigs and leaves, we recognize certain principles of growth and inter-spacial relationships.  The real nature of a tree lies in its organic development and relationships of all its parts to the whole, so that the essential nature of a tree is neither confined to its roots, nor its trunk, its branches, twigs, leaves, blossoms or fruit. From its structure of growing rings, we learn, as in stone, about durability and can see patterns of life in layers of space and time.

In 1977, in preparation for my first exhibition at Leighton House Museum Art Gallery, I sent a brochure to my friend Maire O’Farrell who showed it to her very gifted artist friend Meinrad Craighead.  She became very interested in what she read and saw in my brochure.  Meinrad had lived in Florence where she studied Renaissance art.  She was raised in Chicago where she trained as an artist and taught at universities but spent most of he adult life elsewhere.  First, she went to Italy.  However, after four years in Florence, she tired of Renaissance High Art, finding it elitist and followed her intuition to leave and join in the life of Stanbrook  Abbey. There she took on the name of Meinrad and lived in the Benedictine Monastery as a nun in 1977.  She had studied in the monastery and looked after the trees.  That year, she brought out her own unique book of tree imagery which came to her through meditation.  Her art form was unique in black and white scraper board with shading of greys.

In the Spring of 1974, Meinrad had received a paper clipping from her birthplace which told her that the old magnolia tree that had watched over her family for three generations had been uprooted by developers to make way for a commercial site.  That was the catalyst for the book of tree imagery, an inspiration to all tree lovers.  I, myself, not only wrote to the local council in strong protest when, in Bulawayo, they destroyed the trees outside my house.  I gave them a long talk on the beauty of trees and the necessity of sharing their qualities which watched over all of us for generations.  Similarly, in 1972, our local borough of Kensington received a protest from me when the trees I viewed from my kitchen window were cut down to build a block of apartments and a house. Thankfully, they heard my voice and two were spared.

I drove down with my friend Maire to spend a weekend at Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester, a place full of creative industry, prayer and cultivation of the soil.  One associates the production of illuminated manuscripts, as with the book of Kells, with such a place and other craftsmanship interwoven with painting.  I find it strange that I wove nuns into my tree when my fate met up with Meinrad the artist.  Shortly after this meeting, she announced she was leaving the monastery.  Maire has just coincidently sent me further information about Meinrad.  When she left England she retreated to Albequerque, New Mexico, and her work as artist has continued to flower.  She has received enthusiastic comments, writing of her as the ‘all seeing eye of the mother’ and knows that all that she sees is sacred.  Another refers to her as a ‘creative visionary’, writing of her work now interwoven with the ‘sacredness’ of nature, involving the sacred in the animal spirit world. 

As my latest work is interwoven with animals, I became instantly interested in this aspect of her work.  My tapestries show animal behaviour, particularly relationships between parent and child as with baboons ‘grooming’ and a baboon mother embracing her two offspring.  In the summer of 1996 Meinrad accepted an invitation to create a series of paintings which would accompany Nicolas Ayer’s translation of the Song of Songs.  She writes in the slender book she brought out ‘I began the search for the images.  I recited the Song into the fire which burned in my wood stove, then painting, I watched as the world of the lovers unfolded into the non-verbal landscapes of their  ancient love song.  As I painted, the lovers entrusted me with their intimacy and led me into their sacred trysting place … Contrastingly, I work today, by possibly remembering a photograph and was reinterpreting the threads of love as well as focussing on my intuition.’  Although she worked in colour quite strong including reds and yellow, she now works with black charcoal on white paper.

Meinrad gives creative retreats next to her studio and this summer is coming Oxford to stimulate an interest in retreats in which students will open out to spiritual journeys under her guidance.  She is a great artist in relation to bringing an awareness of the spirit of the Earth.  Her signature that accompanies her writing on her work is of two trees, one descending and the other ascending, forming a whole and both dome-shaped indicative of ecological imagery in the foremost symbol of which is the tree.

Continuing my discussion of ‘nature and art’ and the fact that two opposite states are required to create the form, I should point out that the law of balance, while taking in the law of opposites, creates apparent movement aesthetically, which can be seen in the structure of opposite states of movement and stillness.

Referring back to art, structure we know is illusion, that is one of the foremost discoveries of our 20th Century interwoven with art.  It is a discovery particularly of Western science and not the utterances of Western mystics through their own perception.  This has also come about because changes are happening so fast. As soon as physicists discover one aspect of matter, another reality is discovered.

When living at the sea, I watched the seasonal changes of light, of the colours of the sky and the sun going down in the three months I lived in my flat, especially the twilight hour when the sun cast shadows and when it fell on my blue glass bottles on the low sill.  I made paintings of them.  In fact, I observed gradations of tonal quality as in music, but this was of light and shadows. I loved to capture the changes in a series of paintings with the gold of the dying rays of the sun and the blues of the glass bottles.  They are lying around somewhere in my portfolios.

On a much larger scale, is the fascinating use of artificial light in a sculpture in 1963 by artist Richard Lippold for the PanAm building in New York.  It was called ‘Flight’.  Richard Lippold had written much on structure and illusion. He says that the greatest wonder of this century is this fact.  He continues in his writing that for the first time man is able to prove that all of the means that he, man, has ever used to define the nature of nature and thus his own nature, is the illusion afforded him by his senses and sensibilities of which he sees only ten percent.  It becomes very complex.  His overarching definitions, his certainties, and even uncertainties, are illusion, for perpetual transformation means as soon as one fact is discovered, another annihilates it.  Intuition is kept in perpetual motion and interwoven with scientific discoveries in the structure of matter as defined by the nuclear physicist.  Every effort to describe it from one point of view is soon challenged by a new point of view. The same process I have tried to evaluate in my work likewise occurs psychologically and sociologically and, ultimately, philosophically.  It is a very humbling process, but also a blessing in disguise as it show us the more we know, the less we know. 

In weaving flowers and fruit, my approach as innovator broadened for I wove on my canvas large flowers, usually a single one such as a protea, enlarging the stamens to create another world while working into the very heart of it in close focus.  To this series, I added a tulip of red and gold, its curled large leaf creating a spacial effect through which I looked into another landscape.  Also, a near focus, a large tiger lily, and roses climbing a red brick wall, in the shadow of which emerged figures as I worked unconsciously. I wove several more flower tapestries, including large daisies; just one large white daisy, a yellow-centred one, against a blue sky and two against the brown earth, all in near focus.  It was only when I stepped back and saw the flowers from afar in a landscape that I gained a new perspective of more objectivity in relation to size and they became smaller.

In my series of waterlilies, of which I made many very large and also in miniature form, I showed the idea of what is relative, according to where I was standing and as my eye moved over the landscape in front of me.  The landscape was one of receding water lilies in which the water lily nearest to me I wove large, although it was small compared to the larger ones further away, which I made smaller.  The sizes were exaggerated as I tried to suggest their relative quality. When I travelled on a more global scale north to south and south to north, I made images continually in paintings and tapestries of the sky, the sea, and always trees. At the same time I was intensely interested in the theme of ‘man as machine’ which is illustrated in my ‘Modern Mercies,’ which involved the problems of industrialization and new technologies.  This gave me a continuing perspective.

Looking backwards in order to understand the future, I recall that the end of the eighteenth century was marked as a time of inventions.  In particular, I mention the Spinning Jenny because of my emphasis on weaving.  New sources of energy came with the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century when people drifted from the country to the towns and where cities began to flourish, marked by the emergence of factories.  The Industrial Revolution replaced the crafstsman with the machine worked by engineers.  New forms and new materials came into existence to build bridges and put up railway stations.  The new sources of power in the energy spiral in the 19th century were steam as seen in Turner’s steam ships.  Later, gas was used, then electricity.  Moving into the 20th century, scientists split the atom to release new energy.  Scientists today are working on fusion as the fission process, releasing energy from nuclear power stations, is considered a danger by many.

In art, the movement known as art nouveau flourished at the turn of the century.  It was erotic, sinister, carefree, frivolous, fantastic and a revolt against mechanisation.  It was part of a whole movement for social, political and personal freedom, and flourished in wall papers, tapestries, glass, ceramics, jewellery and above all in architecture.  It took place in Europe and also in the emerging new world. Sociologically, the big cities of Western Europe housed a poverty-stricken proletariat as factories grew. New and bewildering situations arose with the upward movement of freedom through democracy and socialist propaganda.  The age old gap between rich and poor grew with ‘modernity’.

The word ‘modernity’ describes life in the city today and in art ‘modernism’ described the new age of abstract art which began roughly with the painter Kandinsky, interwoven with the so-called ‘spiritual’ in art especially through music.  His paintings were filled with colours and shapes he related to when he listened to abstract music.  His brush marked the canvas simply with colours.  In my final summing up, I related how Kandinsky was influenced by Monet in the later 19th century.

Art Deco drew upon the French tradition, emphasizing elegance while responding to the new demands of life in a modern society.  It was a hybrid style and as such interests me.  I took note because of change.  Art Deco used metals, woods, and even lacquer.  It emphasized function, space and light with a new vitality in relation to colour.  It brought with it a splendour and sophistication. With modernism, artists in the following decades reflected an instability in their work.  In fact, the disintegration of things offered by cubism, expressionism, surrealism, each in its own style, does not signify anything but this idea of the instability of the real, seeming to coincide with the split in man in the 20th century.

Coming into the decade of the 60s, while I was exploring my own medium, particularly ‘man as machine’ and the spatial dimension in my tapestries, interwoven with memories of Africa, Bridget Riley’s black and white repetitive curving lines giving off a moving energy, continued to reflect this instability.  It showed doubts about the solidity of reality in a machine-like and precise fashion.  She received extremely high prices for her canvasses as with the introduction of a new aesthetic, a new stock exchange came into existence.  The name in America of Andy Warhol became the best investment.  Helped by the critics,  of course, to name one Mr. Greenberg, Andy Warhol with his talk of the factory drew attention to mass production with his banal paintings of a tin of baked beans and coco cola bottles.  He certainly made a valid comment followed by an increasing pop art trend of mediocrity aesthetically.  It was not surprising to me that when I visited the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Hayward on the South Bank that there were not more than twenty people looking at the exhibition covering three floors.  My friend accompanying me for a lunch date, refused to look at the exhibition while expressing very strong feelings about the artist’s mediocrity.

I have already written of the generous outpouring of money to put up costly Art Deco buildings in the mid-twenties and early thirties.  This was at a time of the worst depression economically.  There was no sparing of money for the erection of hotels such as the Strand Palace and those on Park Lane with lavish interiors while Broadcasting House in Portland Place included decoration by Eric Gill.  Even factories such as the Hoover Factory on the Great Western Road incorporated architectural features with expensive decorative motifs to show the human side of the mechanized workplace.  Cinemas received the same treatment of costly art deco decoration.  There was no hinting at a depression.  Similarly, now as we reach the time of the 20th Century and the end of the second millennium when there is much economic injustice with the widening gap between rich and poor and difficulty in finding employment to earn a living, there is an intention to erect a dome involving millions of pounds.  Why?  No hint once again of a hazardous time economically.

This chapter is headed ‘ideas and concepts’, technology and transformation in times of industrialization, interwoven with threads of music.  The use of musical terms are always present in my work as will be apparent in the following pages, as well as in the beginning when I wrote of ‘chamber music’ in relation to my smaller tapestries – it is a perpetual interweaving of influences.  I use it as a metaphor for balance.

Music has always been part of my family life.  I still possess an old collection of my father’s records.  Looking though them I recall him listening to Kreizler playing the ‘Hebrew Dance’.  The records were made of shellac then.  I remember the big wind-up gramophone in a tall cabinet with shutters and see myself listening and dancing to other records like Glenn Miller.  Our home was drenched with a love of music and a grand piano, a Reishbach-Grotrian Steinweg on which I practised, stood in our lounge and still does in my lounge today. My father’s favourite instrument was the cello.  My mother, in the days of the silent films, played the piano in the cinema when silent films were the rage.  She graduated later to becoming a well-known teacher and taught Adelaide Newman, one of South Africa’s leading pianists.  I, in the thirties, achieved my exams and many honours, and at the age of ten was awarded one of South Africa’s first bursaries given in the country.  It was a huge sum of money then—twelve guineas.  How things have changed! 

A very unpleasant episode I remember was breaking down on the stage as I performed Rachmaninoff’s G Major Prelude.  I was only about eleven or twelve years old and the other entrants where twice my age.  It is a piece full of runs of chords, demanding much technical skill which I could normally play with ease.  However, I was so nervous, due to the two hours delay, that I could not play the run of chords.  I froze.  Then in sheer panic I ran off the stage followed by my friend Thelma who had been there to turn the pages.  I ran off the stage and broke down into a flood of tears.  There was a deeper reason for my nervousness at the time, related to the death of my baby brother and feeling perhaps I was responsible – guilt – quite illogical.  But it always haunted me.

I did continue to play the piano but later, as my tapestries took over more and more, I left playing on the keyboard and preferred to listen to music, which provided a background to my work.  Furthermore, it became physically too much for my fingers to play the piano.  They were fully occupied stitching my tapestries.  I do not touch the keyboard today – my technique has gone and I am a dreadful sight reader.  Music, however, has always been part of my consciousness and still is.  I think in musical terms as is apparent when I wrote at the beginning of this chapter ’in weaving tapestries in a series I see a theme unfolding in time like a long symphony or concerto’.  I hear it on all different levels in depth which is more meaningful, and on a higher note, to relieve the gloom of the day, my tastes being catholic.  I even have to admit listening to the Spice Girls, seemingly harmonizing on a light note, who will no doubt be followed by the ‘Spice Boys’ or some such cliché.  I will admit my ear is beginning to pick up their rhythms with more pleasure. Considering their youthful years, they may develop a magic as Elton John did with his lovely melodies which I always have responded to despite the harshness of his tonal qualities as he bangs out the rhythm.  He has explained he does this purposefully.  However, I may be wrong, but I don’t detect a lasting profundity to live over the centuries like Mozart or Bach, Beethoven or Schubert, whose music speaks to me as if it comes from the stars.

In 1966, I wrote this:

‘I see the shape of my work unfolding in sonata form as in music, with an exposition, development and recapitulation, where old beginnings are woven with new knowledge to round off the form.   Sonata form is part of the first movement of a symphony.  Its first movement ends with the original key and its second begins out of it.  It continues and then it returns to finish where it began, but the return is in another key, having grown and developed, through new knowledge and the experience of life. Applied to the shape of my work, the exposition sets out the theme and influences on me when I first began to explore this medium through experimentation with threads. The ‘development’ grows out of the bridging period, when I started going annually to South Africa. The recapitulation overlaps this and as my interest in industrialisation grew with urbanization, my exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum in 1996 marked the recapitulation strongly with returns to my roots.  It also led me to hook up on a commercial dimension with an art gallery on the exact spot where my father’s business was and where I, as a child, explored his fishing boats with large sails.  My Irma Stern exhibition focused strongly on the house, housing and the homeless with architecture as seen in the brochure for the exhibition. This was amongst other themes, bringing in music and landscapes, flowers and fruit and technological man. The Director of the Irma Stern Museum insisted I show only my tapestries, not drawings.

Going back to the sixties, I used to play records and listen to music as I wove my abstract tapestries of ‘Prelude’ and ‘Fugue’, in which loosely woven notes were emerging. I concentrated on structure in depth as I wove the form of ‘Fugue’.  Regarding structure, it is in essence an interconnected whole, having a pattern of dynamic cohesion of parts which are held together through harmonising all the parts.  It is the opposite of fragmentation and gives order and unity to parts, bringing them all together to make a whole.  Through it, the artist is able to give meaning to her work.  It can merge with the image or it can be beneath the surface and so is like the skeleton within.  It is particularly important when the exterior world is not reflected and an interior abstract quality is being expressed; it is a frame of reference for the aesthetic qualities.  Structure is both a logical and architectural concept.  Through it you have a recognition of order among individual pieces, in which the pieces are illuminated by their total arrangement.

In my tapestry ‘Fugue’, I have tried to organise musical notes of varying tones and sizes in loose squares with amorphous edges to represent notes.  I organise groups of notes to represent a subject, as the form is made up of subjects, ie groups of harmonizing pieces of melody.  It is just suggestive and I have not worked out a score but merely by organizing my work in this way, interweaving the subjects, that is groups of squares harmonizing a small shape with the whole, complete the form.

In suggesting musical dynamics, I have an aesthetic vocabulary symbolically as follows:  rhythm is expressed in an undulating line; I suggest a crescendo and decrescendo through an arch form of notes represented by squares; a pause or silence through leaving a space in the textures of the canvas.  The dictionary defines texture as the arrangement or disposition of threads of woven fabric.  I repeat, it gives historical perspective and I use it in sociological terms outwardly, but inwardly in psychological and emotional terms as with all music.  A polyphonic texture is a many voiced one.  Voices have their origins in choral music – the prelude and fugue being the best example of this and these forms are the essence of counterpoint.  The essence of contrapunctal style is the contrast between the independent voices which are set off from each other by contrasts of rhythm and contours.  These contrasts cause the music to unfold on several planes, creating an impression of depth and unflagging movement.  In my visual music experiments, squares represent notes with contrasting textures made by using threads such as wools and silks to create different surfaces that enhance the effect, especially as threads are laid on the canvas as layers.  The unique lustre of silk, which I use to suggest a note, stands out from the canvas especially as the light catches it.  An ethereal quality can be obtained by using soft pastels whereas dark sounds are worked by using darker colours.  There is a closeness of the visual and aural.

It is my experience of the African sky while living in Zimbabwe that influenced me to feel and remember the vast dark and deep spaces of a night sky filled with myriads of never-ending stars and sounds moving over the bush, embracing the diversity of an African polyphony.  It is forever etched on my memory.  This was my experience of the ‘texture of the cosmos’, which became very much part of my creativity and poetic consciousness and evolved a range of deep and light blues which dominated my tapestries exhibited in January 1970 at the Royal Festival Hall.  The names alone, such as ‘Movement in Space’ owned by Beryl Chitty (ex-High Commissioner for Jamaica, United Nations and Foreign Affairs), ‘Light Intersecting’ and ‘Still Point’, are suggestive of deep blues and silver at a time in the ‘60s’ of space exploration.  This movement and influence I felt deeply while living in Zimbabwe.  I felt it especially in the night as I sat in my garden under the wide, deep blue sky filled with stars and hearing the sounds of crickets, the hooting of owls, knowing the movement but feeling a stillness in a warm night.  It was inspiring.

I have woven this twinkling blueness into my tapestries, large in size, exhibited eventually at the Royal Festival Hall in 1971 for concert goers on the upper terrace.  It took me in mind and mood back in time to the Renaissance centuries which I hitherto have not touched upon. 

The main burden of scientific reasoning is dependent on mathematics and I feel the connection mathematically with music which I see as manmade and related to numbers.  Yet I never studies maths. It is all very intuitive. The Renaissance scientists were educated in a world of religion which had a philosophy of nature, like Greek civilisation, that the Universe was God’s handiwork.  The names that come to mind are Copernicus and Kepler who propounded a moving earth, which hitherto people believed was stationary and the centre of the Universe.  This immediately altered the individual’s notion of self-importance, of distance, of time.  Kepler wrote in 1609 on the ‘notion of the Planet Mars’ containing very revolutionary ideas - laws of planetary motion around a stationary sun.  His inspiration coming from the heavens was given expression in his ‘The harmony of the world’.  He could explain everything in terms of musical notation when the very soul gives relationship from one note to the other, including black and white semi-tones.  Had Kepler been living today, he would have altered his ideas again and would have had a whale of a time with the discovery of so much more that has been discovered regarding the movement of the planets. 

Whenever I hear Holst’s Planets my mind goes back in time to seeing the sky in the Rhodesian, now Zimbabwean, setting sun.  I have had that experience here, living in London which is mostly cloud-covered.  The experience then is there forever in my mind and I carry in it a counterworld to bring forth when I hear astronomers giving talks and often it is strangely interwoven with music.  My ‘Four Seasons’ tapestries by contrast are very down to earth and far from deep blues,  They are light colours of the daylight.

The great revolution in modern music begins in the 20th Century with the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg who brought a dramatic change to form.  He was born in Vienna in 1871 and died in 1951.  He was a very energetic pioneer who also painted very well.  His painting of the composer Alban Berg shows excellent tonal qualities.  He was also a poet.  His restlessness broke with traditional composition and was a rebellion against the chromaticism pursued by Wagner and practised by Debussy.  By putting words to music, he led the way into the 20th Century.  I remember sitting and listening to his opera ‘Moses and Aaron’ which I saw in the ‘sixties’ at Covent Garden.  I managed to sit through it then finding it interesting, more in an intellectual way then, but I certainly could not do that today.  ‘Moses and Aaron’ was his last opera, weaving together his own libretto and own music. Inspired by the Old Testament writings, he became very conscious of being a Jew and finally returned to Jerusalem in 1933.  There certainly was humanity in Schoenberg, but I found him too prescriptive as a composer.

Later, although I took a great deal of interest in Modern composers such as Stockhausen from Germany, Ligeti from Romania, Boulez and Varese from France, my enthusiasm abated and mostly, sad to say, their music remains in the closet for me.  I listen to what they say, follow how they think creatively and, after a while, switch off the radio. I am into another space, another time.  I did not like the sounds they created, although it had validity at the time.

I want to write on Stockhausen who seemed obscure and esoteric with a deep philosophy, not only of music but certainly of life and very much of our industrial age.  I was fascinated watching the dancers of the Royal Ballet moving to his music.  He had a sad life and certainly rose above it.  Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in 1928.  His father was an elementary school teacher while his mother, a long suffering depressive which greatly affected Stockhausen, had three children in three years.  She ended up in a mental hospital where she died.  His father died in the war.  Stockhausen showed early musical talent, playing the piano at the age of six years old and continued with music, working very hard for many years to earn sufficient money to live by.  He took courses in musical composition, which came naturally to him, with the eminent French composer Olivier Messiaen when he arrived in Paris in 1952 and began to compose operas.  He spent several months annually on tour, giving lectures and conducting seminars on composition for New Music while teaching at the Cologne Courses for New Music, which he founded. His musical compositions were played on the Japanese network in Tokyo in 1966. He married in 1951 for the first time.  He married twice and had six children ultimately.

He came to America in 1971.  In 1964, he had formed a group to play instrumental music, which he called intuitive music, giving concerts in New York enthusiastically received in 1971.  Most famous is Hymnem. He travelled to the East with this believing it had healing quality.  His performance in New York gave a ritual trance-like Indian Kathakali dance which came through both structure and ritual procession. He certainly was in his time a man of great stature, dwelling on the spirit. I found it interested me but could not go along with it. I have not heard Stockhausen’s music for a very long time, but I still listen to American Modernist composer, Elliot Carter  I find his tunes are propelled by his own unique rhythmic impulses, the results sounding bewildering yet, paradoxically, fascinating. They are full of movement and depth of thought.

He is extremely practical and uses his own vocabulary for chords he has worked out to explore modern harmony, while being aware of dissonance.  He catalogues his chords, listing all the possible combinations of the notes, of four notes, of five notes, and so forth, studying their relationships.  This is immensely hard work, while he explores a specific harmonic field.  He said in interview in 1984, while emphasizing his modernity, that Wagner and his followers conversely used the whole harmonic vocabulary as they heard it and from piece to piece, he tries to pursue more deeply the harmonic structures he had already worked out in his very different way.  So he was continually exploring.

I, in my imagery, follow the pattern of harmonic wholeness, using a visual representation of musicians playing musical instruments.  In showing relationships, it illustrates dissonance and consonance.  By weaving musicians playing their musical instruments, both female and male, I focus on part of the human body, passing from one tapestry to the next, giving a fuller picture of the human being moving more and more into the canvas. First, I show the instrument – a harp with focus across the canvas on the arms and hands playing the instrument and showing just a small part of a seated human form, emphasising the hands.  The human form is on the edge of the canvas.  I do the same with my next canvas of a flautist, but she has more of her form visible, part of her face and hair showing on the edge of the canvas but seen a little more.  A spiral in the background unfolding from the instrument represents the wind of the wind instrument as notes represented by coloured squares of silk.  This canvas is followed by a violin played by a girl seated halfway across the canvas with the same focus on the hands.  In the background can be seen a man’s legs emerging on the canvas.  I see it on the canvas before it is woven.  My emphasis is on the pursuit of dissonance and consonance which I see in a visual way.

To return to Elliot Carter.  He continues (in his interview) that he has from 1948 onwards (when he composed his Bello Sonata) been influenced by the jazz music of the late ‘thirties’ and ‘forties’, particularly Fats Waller. What got him going was the way jazz musicians played with the melody against the rhythm section, making two simultaneous time systems.  He has also been influenced by the movies as well as dance, particularly the choreography of Balanchine. 

Elliot Carter is a male composer with a studio in the Guilliard School, where he teaches and is well occupied in leading a full life.  He said in his interview, ‘First of all I should say being so occupied, I am indeed fortunate that I have a wife who keeps life in order so that I can compose and teach and find time for such organizations as the American Composers Alliance, which helps to put on contemporary music concerts’, adding that composers have a hard enough time as it is.  She must do a remarkably good job, or did.    At ninety years of age, he looks remarkably young and fit.

As a woman artist, as a mother, as a daughter, my priorities have taken second place at the right time which takes its toll.  It can be made into a big plus sign with positive thinking, except I certainly will not be reaching ninety yeas of age.  As a mother, I have had to consider the emotional needs of my daughters.  They have learnt in their turn the right priorities and as a consequence give continuity to the new generation.  They have understanding of human needs.

And now to write on ‘Modern Mercies’. When I started to do Tai Chi, I loved to dance and move in its rhythm, as the symbols spoke to me in a meditative way, involving the whole body in a ying yang flow with mind and body.  Tai Chi had beautiful hand movements and connected me to the earth from which the energy flows.  It connected with the awareness that the individual has to bridge inner and outer needs.  So began my ‘Modern Mercies’ two years later when I was still practising it.

Man is a social animal and has outer and inner needs.  The outer needs which the individual must satisfy in order to continue, relate to shelter, expressed through the image of the house, especially housing (Panel III) and ‘Dreaming of Houses (Panel IX)  Also, nutrition, as in panels IV and V as fish form in the body of the Knight, and the ‘biophysical’, the environment – a healthy and pleasant one with good clean air, water and fertile earth, a dream to be realised if we are to survive.

I began my series of the ‘Modern Mercies’ and wove ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’ in 1975.  This became panel I of my ten panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’.  Not planned, it grew organically first into seven panels and was exhibited on a seven-sided structure.  Then this grew in to ten panels.  The image of ‘Knight Crossing a Bridge’ came to my mind as I crossed the Hammersmith Bridge.  The lines of the bridge can be seen in the long panels as the figure strides across, with the outlines of wings in a reverse shape to the bridge to complete the design.  They are the wings of imagination interwoven with discontent.  Across his body is a digital battery.  The body is covered with undulating leaves which were, as I moved my hand, intended to be graphs interwoven with economics or money suddenly becoming the curves of hills.  I imagined I saw nature taking over as my colours became greens of the countryside.  I had just sold the last of my ‘Electronic grey man’ panels, woven in the sixties alongside the abstract tapestries.  This was followed by ‘Electronic grey man I’, depicting a figure with a ball and chain.  The first panel of the ‘Modern Mercies’ was followed by my Panel II, emphasizing the hills and landscapes and water, with the beginnings of fish forming in the body. The panels are concerned with deep psychological and spiritual needs  and I show that a bridge must be found between man and his needs to give completeness as we all are interrelated.  The complexity is vast.  A complete individual leads to a whole society with greater understanding.

To sum up: In this series I show the individual in transformation. There is movement towards integration, interweaving ethical considerations, particularly in relation to the environment, affecting mankind globally. I particularly place emphasis on industrialization with special reference to the mixed blessings technology brings in our contemporary lives because technology has evolved and man must evolve too.  He/she must become a ‘knight’ to give service in the 20th century sense - a 20th century beriddled with problems and materialism.

Having side-stepped to write on Elliott Carter, I continue to write of my interest in the new music in the time of other modern composers as well as on modern dance.  As composers I remember them as interesting as part of the history of our time.  They energize in their way.  Elliot Carter does not like electronic aids which Varese largely used and on which pop music is so dependant.  Elliot Carter finds the use of new technologies add a primitive quality to music which would not be part of his sound.  He is an exception.  New electronic technologies are related very much to our times.  I was interested in their aiming for new structures, helped by the new electronic technologies, and the creating of new sounds which were discordant and unharmonious.

Having written on Stockhausen who brought a certain quiet to the urban landscape, let me comment on composer John Cage who rebelled against elitism,  He has been compared in the art world to the French artist Marcel Duchamp who, in 1917, took a porcelain urinal, signed it R.Mutt and submitted it to an exhibition in New York.  Thirty five years later in 1952, John Cage, in a similar spirit but not quite as rebelliously (certainly he was less intellectually uptight) presented a composition called 4.33.  Let me explain why.  He asked a pianist to sit at the piano at a concert in utter silence for four and a half minutes and do nothing else – after all life has been going too fast ever since.

I remember feeling outraged at first but after going through a process of questioning, I found him thoughtful and interesting, especially the more I got to know hm.  I asked was he waiting for a burst of laughter, was he serious, was he testing a middle class audience of concert-goers waiting for their reaction to too much  busyness around them? The piece was of course called ‘Silence’.  In the same spirit, I did think the critic, leaving a space in his newspaper column the next day, gave an equally apt reply.  And so his fame was born.  Cage wrote abundantly and gave lectures.  He tried to remove the class distinction between music and noise by making ‘4.33’ a mere frame into which outside noises could enter as full collaborators, an example of equalizing, an example of artistic democracy.  For a man who became famous for silence he talked a lot and presented a number of paradoxes.  In the 269 pages of his book , A Year from Monday, was a ‘Lecture on Nothing’.  I really see him a a joker in he pack – a man who tries desperately to keep himself out of his work strange to relate.  It was good to read that he found the work of Bach astonishingly beautiful with all his emphasis on modernity and similarly related to the music of  Scriabin and Stravinksy, when he first heard it in Paris, having dropped out of college.  Ultimately, through contact with Eastern philosophy, he came to be free of the likes and dislikes and move without restraint in any direction.

Cage saw himself as an opener of doors rather than as a dictatorial moulder and shaper.  He accepted like followers of Zen Buddhism that just as serious matters are often a joke, jokes are often serious.  The important thing is whether he has opened our ears to life in a new way. In this way, he left a legacy of ultra modernism.  Like all artistic manifestations, his inventions were in the air waiting to be born.  They are reflected in the work of other musicians and writers, choreographers and in painters like Rauschenberg and Jaspar Johns.  He has wide interests and a witty tongue.  He painted and studied architecture while also gardening for a spell in Santa Monica and was the musical director of the Cunningham Dance Company for several years.  A born performer, he organized the first ever happening in ‘Black Rock’ in 1952.  Merce  Cunningham and him were close friends.  They both spoke the same language. It was unlike the language of Stockhausen although they composed against a background of the time with dance and music intertwining.  They were full of unexpected oppositions.

My daughters and I went to all the modern dance shows, the first of which was when I just arrived back in London in 1964.  That was when we saw Merce Cunningham who introduced an athletic quality into dance which was no longer genteel like classical ballet.  I have a strong memory of us laughing all the way home on the tube when we discussed how he turned his feet inwards, defying the usual way of feet turning very much outwards as in conventional classical ballet.  Cunningham was a large man, athletic in build.  It took some getting used to visually.  However, he did arouse interest.

The new forms of dance from the USA provided a stimulus to new energies and were thought provoking.  Martha Graham was the name of the moment then.  She introduced sculptural poses into her choreography.  Listening to her talking about her creative approach, how she worked on the body, especially the hip area, was most interesting as was her general philosophy in the changing times,  When she spoke it was a revelation.  She explained she treasured all she had learnt, but that she had to change her form to suit the changing time which demanded speaking a new language of communication through dance.

The Netherlands dance group was just as active.  The group worked towards evolving a performance that worked as both a spectacle and an environment to bring about a fusion of performance through the flow of ideas and new energies.  This certainly happened to me.  I remember going with a young friend Bill, a geneticist, to see the Netherlands Dance Company and when I came home I drew out a large symbol of the ying-yang which I had never seen before.  It was the way the dancers moved and what appeared like drops falling from the ceiling of the set that made me intuitively draw the symbol . I remember the dancers walking erect and slowly across the stage. It required me to weave a large round tapestry which I called ‘Creation’.  It was shown at the Prudhoe Gallery exhibition in the West End.  I never wanted to sell it and kept it as part of my own collection.

Other new dance structures which attracted me were performed by Alwin Nikolais in his ‘Imago’ with beautiful tent-like flowing costumes and strange inverted pot-like headgear.  I remember his strong lighting, leaving a red glow.  He introduced new steps but I am unable to convey the choreography. I can describe the contribution of the dancer Maurice Bejart as making all of his many dances on the stage form into a fantail structure.  He was an exciting dancer, my favourite.  I naturally thought of doves when I saw the fantail structures.  Very different from Nureyev whom I often saw with Margot Fonteyn.  Bejart exhibited the same strength of body but his presence broadened out one’s mind into a wide structure of choreography of dancers occupying the whole stage.  While listening to the radio with one ear, I heard that Martha Graham Dance Company was in London which they had last visited eight years ago.  She was a self-taught dancer from Pennsylvannia.  The Barbican season is presenting vintage Graham with works from the ‘thirties’ and forties’ that at the time labled her as the great force in modern dance.  Vintage Graham includes Aaron Copeland’s 'Appalachian Spring' (1944) inspired by the pioneers who settled in America.  Before that in 1936 she choreographed ‘Chronicle’, seen as one of the most brilliant pieces of dance ever made on the subject of war projected with tremendous emotion.  Highlights of the season at the Barbican included her dance incorporating the Greek myth of ‘Theseus slaying the Minotaur’, used as a metaphor for the individual victory over fear.   I remember her as a great force and sighed when I heard a discussion amongst the critics where the female voice pronounced her dated but was delighted to hear the male voice pronounce her work electrifying.  She had a very original mind.

Contemporary dance like contemporary music and art in particular is full of ‘yeses’ and nos’. I know what I say ‘yes’ to and how I perceive what is happening in time relating to my own work.  I know what I value.  Modern is a difficult term to define in the context of the arts.  Although I am a senior citizen, I see the ‘sixties’ when I arrived back in Britain – to London in fact – as the beginning of contemporary modern times, especially with the arrival of the pill.  It was the dawn of the permissive society, giving women a new liberation, a time when Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch which certainly inflamed the young ‘me’ generation, especially females, and when the Beatles got high on drugs, producing absorbing light music and lyrics.  They were the new stars in the firmament of the famous, utterly important today.

Going back to the 19th century, it is said serious modern music began with the composing of the ‘Prelude a L’apres midi d’un Faune’ by Claude Debussy. Other music included for me Dvorjak, the Czech composer’s ‘New World Symphony’.  In fact, I wove a small tapestry of black hands holding a conductor’s stick – a theme worked out as I do in my system of notation with various sized squares representing the familiar melody of the ‘New World Symphony’.  I wove these black hands against a red African sunlit sky as a new time dawned in South Africa, bringing new political freedom. That was in 1984.  I wove a similar sized tapestry of hands, this time white, conducting against a background of green trees, water and blue skies, a theme from Beethoven’s 'Symphony Pastorale’  This was inspired by a visit to Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town in the same year, a gardener’s delight.

Amongst more memories of dance and movement in a changing world flooded with new ideas, Madam Rambert and her company of dancers and particularly choreographers stand out.  Her whole company, established in 1966, suddenly changed its style, repertoires and their performances, which we all looked forward to seeing in the MercuryTheatre in Notting Hill Gate.  They had their moments in the ‘70s’ when they performed in Islington when they became much too noisy in a very exuberant way, which brought on a migraine for my younger daughter.

Initially Madame Rambert’s company consisted of a small group of dancers including new choreographers.  In early days, Norman Morrice was the choreographer who did away with the corp de ballet because of diminishing funds.  He reverted to a company entirely of soloists. This meant that as many new works as possible could be produced and Martha Graham’s classes with emphasis on sculptural forms were introduced to supplement their daily classical ballet classes.  In that time artists, particularly sculptors, influenced choreography and possibilities arose in which they could bring movement or stillness into the décor by introducing kinetic art or with moving structures which could give the illusion of drawing.  I remember the rise of Christopher Bruce as a choreographer and the introduction of new ideas by him, in which poetry was spoken by a dancer who stood at the side of the stage.  He interwove his words with the action and the music played by their excellent small orchestra.  He is a living example of transcendence, over-coming lameness which came about through polio as a baby.  What stands out in recollection is his portrait of Pierrot Lunaire, the sad clown clutching a frame.  His very latest work, full of his own particular lyricism, is especially commissioned by Sadlers Wells (I write in 1998 when the Brighton Festival was on and his company danced there) to announce the opening of the new building of the theatre.  The piece set to British composer Dave Heath’s rich music for strings with Ballet Rambert’s reputation alive as ever as the soulful Celtic highland laments intertwine with unexpected modern inflections and reflections.  ‘Airs’ choreographed by Paul Taylor, one of America’s greatest living choreographers, is set to a selection of Handel’s music, reminiscent of water and air currents, creating a fusion of classical regality and grace.  There is a balance of sweeps of energetic music with beautiful slow movements.

Experimental dance continues in the States and to a lesser extent in Britain but I do not go to see it as I used to.  There is always the TV screen which not being live is not as satisfying.  One of the last dance revolutionaries I saw was Twyla Tharp who performed recently in ‘Get’ (1998) at Sadlers’ Wells to the music of Rossini.  I don’t particularly like her intellectual austere approach to dance and she has been known to face her audience in a square looking inwards.

In Europe, who stands out as noteworthy is Rudolph Laban. He introduced his ideas regarding dance and modern education in 1948 and continued to revise his ideas as he perceived change causing transformation in our advanced modern mechanized society with its accent on competitiveness. He believed the instinct for healthy movement was crushed unless fostered.  He observed that the child had the potential to move gracefully as in dance movement.  To rush it was wrong as it was necessary to enjoy it.  If one had the potential to be a great dancer, all the better, but it was not necessary to begin with.  It was to be encouraged.  So he mapped the need to understand and to know the child’s instinctive efforts at self-development, beginning with the movement of the limbs from its ball-like position in the womb.  Laban emphasized that life started in the movement of the child in its embryonic form in the mother’s womb.  Then it was born, gasping for breath crying out its first cry --- but first came the dance in the womb and then the sound.  The mother can encourage the feeling in the limbs by massaging them each day.  It encourages the feeling for stretching as in primitive dance.  It is seen so clearly in the Africans I know so well, accenting their dance with kicking movements, especially in the lower parts of the body and also the hitting of the arms.  It is so instinctive.  The developing child and primitive adult first jump, then overcome gravity with flying leaps in the air.

Laban’s educational theories are largely aimed at the boy and girl in teenage puberty years – to avoid awkwardness and take pleasure in the right movements, especially when walking with upright postures, while building the muscles and loosening the joints.  Dance, through certain steps, can build up awareness in changes of movement; these can also reflect changes of time which often alters at the end of one’s life in relation to inner perception, followed by creativity.  Laban calls industrial man what I refer to as technological man in my own work.

What I remember gave me most benefit is being made aware of Laban’s basic philopsophy in opposite movements making a whole – moving, that is, up and down with the hand, while taking bouncing steps backwards and forwards. Then rolling the shoulders backwards and forwards while moving in a dance sideways to the left and right, feeling the energy rising through the feet, circulating into the arms, especially through the palms., Also awareness of the chakra centres of the spine going from red at the base, orange at the second chakra, yellow the third chakra, green the fifth, blue the sixth and purple the seventh, each governing an area where organs are affected.  (A chakra is an energy centre.)  Laban established and developed the standard principles of dance and movement notation, generally known as Labanotation or kinetography.  He established a knowledge of the body moving in space in a very exhilarating way.  He emphasized the poetry of body movements.  At least once or twice during the day while working, I will stand up, put down my work and do his dance movements.  I involved myself in his movement of the arms before working on my spatial tapestries in the sixties.

Awareness of the Laban method was given to me by my physical education teacher at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1968.  This was at a time when I attended ballet classes as well as modern jazz dance with a teacher from the Pineapple studio in Floral Street, Covent Garden.

Towards the end of the sixties, I went to a considerable number of operas accompanied by my Argentinian friend Carlos Stevens from Buenos Aires.  He was inclined to be left wing and alive to all the good things London had to offer, one of which was opera, expressing new ideas.  One which stands out in my memory is Tippet’s modern opera, very Jungian in orientation.  There was the ‘Knot Garden’ and also ‘Midsummer Marriage’.  This modern opera had the chorus of male singers garbed in while suits – something totally new.  I admired Tippet tremendously as a composer for his vision as a musician and as a man with a strong sense of composition, which he translated with his extraordinary gift not only in opera but other forms of music such as his concertos. He certainly was a child of his time and his opera ‘A child of our time’ aptly named, translated his feeling of suffering in relation to the holocaust.  He was a left winger, appalled by the money bags desires of people in the thirties.  He even supported a labourer who had become jobless due to the depression.  He reacted strongly to the ‘Kristalnacht’ when the Jews in Germany were decimated.

I had many young friends in the sixties from South America whom I met through Carlos.  They drank too much alcohol and became a bit too convivial as the night went on and never seemed to know when to go home  Through them I met a dancer from Chile.  He was also an excellent painter who lived in New York and, on visiting my home, he informed me about the scene there in New York.  I remember he was particularly enthusiastic about my ‘Eye’ tapestry (1967).  I can see him standing and looking at this tapestry and remarking on its harmonious aesthetic while viewing it with a painter’s eye. He was fascinated that I used threads instead of oil paints, but he understood why.

After my mother died in 1973, I went to yoga lessons and learnt the asanas to help the tension in my neck and back. I did yoga after my jazz dance when I left the polytechnic in Regent Street.  Yoga helped me to stretch, which I still do automatically on rising every day.  I also meditated then. Today, I practice ‘autumn’ aerobics as well as Prunella Stacks ‘health and beauty’ to suit our different modern living. 

My teacher at the polytechnic advised me to attend yoga classes after my neck and back problems developed in 1969-70 when she introduced me to yoga teachers followers of Iyengar, who wrote ‘Light on Yoga’ with a forward written by Yehudi Menuhin.  Iyengar taught pupils of the Menuhin school with bad posture from playing the violin annually, and I was sent to his remedial class in 1970. He was a strict disciplinarian which somehow frightened me.  However I did realize it was a privilege to be seen by him.  I was doing well with my training which was correcting the pain I was suffering.

In his relaxation class I sat next to a woman in her eighties who taught yoga all her life.  She sat on my right hand side and during his relaxation class I had an extraordinary experience.  Pupils were lying on the floor meditating while Iyengar spoke.  I was sitting upright, listening and watching, when suddenly I felt myself wafting out of my right shoulder at a spot where I had a scar on my skin.  I received this scar when twelve years old when a surgeon removed a cyst which healed to form this scar tissue.  I had never experienced this wafting out of my body before which, as it happened, I was overcome by a divine feeling of oneness with the world.  I can only describe it as ‘the peace beyond all understanding’ which I never ever experienced again.  I quickly returned to everyday consciousness by making myself return to my body.  During this period, I used to feel this return to my body in my sleep as I woke each morning.  This was before and continued after my sister’s death on 4th May 1971. I was told I was being prepared for my mother’s death and crossing to the other side.  At that time, I was working on my ‘Lotus’ tapestry.  While good things were happening to me in my personal life, those I loved dearly were departing and while reaching out to the light, I recognized the darkness I was transcending.  It was then that I started Tai Chi which taught me to ground myself and enjoy its slow graceful movements.

Perhaps one of the most up-to-date approaches to modern dance I have yet seen, was two or three months ago, made by the Australian Modern Dance Company.  Their outstanding choreographer had all the technology at his disposal to make a fine film.  This was not only in terms of dance steps themselves and the use of particular kinds of body movements but sharing how he, aided by a second choreographer, interviewed an enormous number of Aborigines about their culture to make them take a pride in it. The result of their interviewing was the production of an excellent film full of compassion and understanding, bringing the Aborigines into the 20th Century as our respect for them grew. The film that we saw showed the dance performed by aboriginal modern dancers, as in the background you heard their songs and saw their musical instruments. Simultaneously we saw other cultural imagery with an aboriginal Australian flavour. All facets of culture linked.  It was a kaleidoscope of colour and meaningful symbols.

I should imagine this denoted their cultural roots interwoven with their unique semi-desert landscape with rocks, dryness and open spaces.  This reminded me sometimes of Zimbabwe and at other times of the Kalahari desert where the Bushmen live, although their beliefs had different origins. The Bushmen were hunter-gathers, while the Aboriginals were more sedentary which the film evoked.

The commentary gave more dimension, telling of the making of bridges metaphorically North to South and of their feel for fish which as part of their diet played a large part in their cultural symbols, as it did amongst African black people throughout the continent.  Then as the Aboriginals sat around a fire you heard stories they told and spoke of their beliefs in ‘the dream-time’.  It was magic.  The dream-time with strong cosmic feelings goes back to a time long ago.  This was all interwoven with the ancestral spirits whom they saw as guiding them.  One moment while watching the film you experienced this primordial feel and the next you were pivoted into the modern era.  This primordial feeling I know from living in Central Africa and later from South Africa, but not today – it is only in remembrance.  The choreographers questioned so many Aboriginals about their stories and their lives as lived today and they heard, while talking and questioning them, how their bridging helped to bring them into modern times and gave them respect and dignity which I see as most gratifying.  And watching this all, especially when they spoke of urban living today, spoke to me as well.  I recalled the time when I saw the cave paintings in the bush both in Zimbabwe and parts of South Africa outside Cape Town where I saw paintings of elephants in red ochre on the rocks of the cave. 

Unfortunately, because they have been downgraded, many aborigines succumbed to drink as Africans and Bushmen and other so-called underdeveloped people of the third world, including in the USA, the Native Americans, and in Canada the Inuit have done.  With this went a lot of their self respect in the process. So now, the Australian Ballet groups, in applying their philosophy, have certainly helped these people into the modernity of the sixties.  The group danced three successive Saturdays as shown on television and this performance I just described was their last.  I watched for over an hour bewitched.  It connected me with the Aboriginal art exhibition I had seen at the Hayward Gallery in 1995.  The aborigines’ paintings were worked with dots, giving painstakingly detailed work, one of which I particularly liked called ‘Flying ants dreaming’.  We saw so many flying ants come out of the ground after the rain in Zimbabwe.  I noticed this proclivity for detail by the African children and teenagers I taught in Zimbabwe.  The flying ants were depicted as two wing shapes outstretched with a small dot in the centre and a the tips of the wings were drawn U shapes and painted at the site of dreaming. The colours were earthy ochres and browns in long wavy lines made up of dots repeated throughout the painting, which may have been painted in strips of bark, outlined over and over again.  There was no such thing as perspective; it was flat painting characterized by a joy in making the dots.  When I taught African children in the township of Bulawayo, they would draw every leaf on the tree.  There was no subtly in the use of colour, it came straight from the heart in its directness.  I organized collecting paintings of children from such places as the Cyrene mission school run by Canon Patterson who sent their paintings to San Francisco where he received high prices from the museums.  I visited Cyrene and saw their church had murals of biblical themes which they painted and their Christ was naturally a black man.  I sent the work I collected to the Brooklyn Museum where I knew Toby Rose in charge of the department of art and connected with museums worldwide.  We arranged this interchange with our museum in Bulawayo.

I have devoted much time and space to dance interwoven with music and innovations in modern forms of dance, as well as the medium of film.  Matthew Bourne comes to mind to complete the picture.  He is Director of Adventures in Motion Pictures, one of the UK’s most popular dance companies.  He coincidentally graduated from the Laban Centre in 1985 with a degree in Dance/Theatre, spending a further year training with Laban’s Transitional Dance Company.  He is most recently remembered for his production of Swan Lake – a version of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet in which the swans were all men and not female as was the traditional interpretation.  It ended on a sad note of a very repressed prince whose mother never showed him love and all the torments he suffered, ending in his death – a profoundly moving interpretation.  The choreography was gripping and the lead swan danced by Adam Cooper was bewitching.  The corps de ballet used the same  poses with hands held pointed together and the arms stretched backwards, looking like wings.  Their neck movements were swanlike and Matthew Bourne certainly observed all this with acute perception.  The ballet was a creative blending of opposites of happiness and sadness interpreted through dance which in time affected my own creativity in my tapestries.

I should just mention before turning to the basis of dance rhythm that the theatre of Holland Park introduced an excellent group – the Union Dance Company - who gave four performances of modern dance and staged a world premiere of a new piece by a Cuban choreographer, Eduardo Rivera.  This showed a heavy influence of African, Latin and Caribbean culture.  Alongside Rivera’s piece was a collaboration with Denise Wong of Black Mime Theatre which bonded the art forms of dance and mime together. The fusion of these modern forms was immensely liberating and performed to packed houses.

At present in July 1999 Carlos Acosta has joined the Royal Ballet and is also a dancer from Cuba.  A short background note will relate that he came from a large poor family of twelve children with a devoted mother.  Cuba helps its dancers financially to achieve the maximum from their talent and in this way they are encouraged to blossom and attain international fame as Carlos Acosta has.  In this way his achievement in dancing with the Royal Ballet is very different from Nureyev and Baryshnikov's acceptance in the West to become stars.  He is not running away from a country but has firm roots.  Although getting to the top must have been accompanied by hard work as is demanded by dance with great care of the body, apparently when it comes to leaps he is compared to Nureyev, although their physical appearance is very different.

Dance and rhythm are basic to life.  The universe is built on rhythm, from the rhythmic motion of the planets to the rhythmic patterns in a prehistoric shell.  Our heart beats rhythmically.  There is rhythm with the ebb and flow of the tides, the changing seasons and music.  It is rhythm because it is made up of long and short beats unlike a clock which beats with a regular and perfect precision.  The rhythm of early man is expressed through the stamping of his feet and clapping of his hands.  Rhythm is basic to the black man of Africa, particularly Southern Africa with which my experiences and work links.  For my Irma Stern Museum exhibition, I produced a tapestry of a couple dancing – a coloured boy and a Malay girl, he recognizable by his very oily hair, she by her straight long black silky hair.  As I write I remember, the dancers beating out their rhythms.  A commercialized attraction today, it nevertheless is and was an integral expression of their rhythms – with thongs of leather twining their ankles and on tin on which other metals are threaded, the men stamping their feet in a pattern of long and short beats with varying accents.  They repeat this pattern with a wild abandon while singing, carrying their spears.  The strangely primitive picture is completed as they are clothed in animal skins – not exactly 20th century style.  I also am fascinated when watching Africans on a building site, the passing of bricks thrown in a rhythm as the men sang.

This same quality of rhythm abounds in African music, especially jazz which developed as a rallying song for freedom. Top of the list, however, jazz has the most popular rhythms and beats and in our global village of the universe today is appreciated and enjoyed worldwide.  I have woven tapestries of black musicians with focus on their hands called ‘Still Life with African Musical Instruments’ as well as ‘Man playing pan-pipes’ and drawings of young boys playing recorders and paintings of string players.

History and memory weave together all the time.  I write, feeling the excitement it created and I hope others will feel too.  Today this weaving of images has become a subjective/objective continuum symbolically.  I hear many using the same language while placing it in the context of the feminine contribution.  The next stage in the weaving is to find the balance between male and female, while looking to the younger generation, to the child with hope.  The older generation brings wisdom through the best teacher of all, life’s experience, but their life span is limited.

I continue the thread to give historical perspective to the development of jazz in South Africa.  Although concentrating on jazz in South Africa, memory goes back to the music and dance I saw and imbibed in Zimbabwe.  I was greatly uplifted when I saw on television as I did last evening, the dance of the men and women who sang and played their musical instruments, recalling their cultural events with the same rhythmic beats.

African rhythm is made through strong, deep, unique voices chanting one melody against the other.  It brought inspiration to well-known Paul Simon in New York.  Split up from his partnership with Garfunkel, he looked further afield and inspired by the tracks he heard of the South African black singers the Ladysmith Black Mambazo group who were playing with the Soweto Rhythm Sector.  A friend had given him recordings of their chanting and harmonization which are so appealing rhythmically.  This inspired him to fly out to South Africa and ask if he could use their tracks in 1984.  They readily agreed as Paul Simon, when in partnership with Garfunkel, had performed to huge audiences in Times Square and would bring the Ladysmith Group excellent publicity. He obviously was sympathetic to the South African black man’s problems and during 1985 worked on Graceland which he brought out in 1986.  One of the most well known tunes was ‘Homeless’.  Could any theme be nearer my heart – I saw it all bridging with South Africa since the 1970s?  He used the singing voices recorded on the track ‘Diamonds on the Souls of her Shoes’ and he dug deep into the ‘mbaqanga’, which is a rhythmical popular music style of southern Africa .

Africans come from poor backgrounds and once engulfed by a minority white population they sang their song of freedom.  Through being inveigled into a money economy at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a shift from country to town to pay their taxes.  They were caught up by Westernization as industrialization and urbanization spread, bringing mixed blessings and new technologies, especially radio and television.

Jazz came to South Africa in the 1920s.  They heard the records of Glenn Miller and others in the twenties and thirties, and certainly the negro spirituals spoke a language with which they identified.  At an early age, well-known men in the jazz world grew up exposed to a church culture.  Names like Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim in recordings spoke of the poverty they experienced and humiliation from childhood days relegated to inferior citizens by shameful laws. They grew in stature later with acceptance overseas in Britain and the USA where they gained appreciation and respect as their talents were valued. It transformed them. Their experience of reverse roles as celebrities bringing pleasure through their music made them feel like human beings as their music thrilled people all over the world and earned them a sizeable living.  What is more they made visits to the country in which were born and could help fellow human beings struggling like they had done.

During the years of struggle before the new South Africa was born, the editor of the famous Drum Magazine helped promote talented musicians during difficult circumstances of the apartheid years.  Talent flourishes under such circumstances in the struggle for survival and freedom – a sort of blessing in disguise.  The musical richness allowed to flourish had it roots in their own cultural patterns.  Mazekela spoke how he was influenced by African musical form namely the kwela. I recall, as I write, Anne our African maid, dancing the kwela in our garden in Bulawayo.  Always joyful, with great love for Angela, and singing with happiness, she moved backwards and forwards accentuating her bottom with the movement while touching the grass lightly as she swayed.  It had a distinctive Africa flavour.  The rhythm influenced Mazekela and other jazz musicans as they improvised with groups of other black musicians, expressing new jazz melodies through their extraordinary talents of harmonization with a natural ease.  The kwela was in the blood and they picked it up rhythmically as they improvised in a chain of players, leading from one to the other in a sequence of new melodies.

Only in 1959 was a jazz band, the ‘Jazz Epistles’ given a recoding for the first time.  The reason was obvious.  The recording studios were run by white people and these very talented jazz musicians had to play games to get the recording.  In spite of the humiliation, they went on practising in the day time and earned some money playing in black clubs by night.  Only 500 copies were recorded.  The name that stands out at that time is that of Kippie Moeketsi who played saxophone.  He had a very good memory and through it he progressed, having learnt to play in the townships where he grew up, and had lessons with master musicians as teachers.  American ‘swing’ had a great influence on them and Moeketsi and his group of five, including saxophonists, pianist, trumpet player clarinet, went on regardless of the white man’s uncooperative recording industry in South Africa  refusing them. Kippie composed with ease and it was saxophonist genius Charlie Parker whom he started to mimic in behaviour as well.  The group were offered a chance to play in the musical ‘King Kong’ in London and then broke up.  Kippie did not take up the chances.  London was a disappointment to them, it did not fulfil the promise for them and recording companies did not give them a good deal.  They were learning about life and how hard it is to survive in spite of great talent, especially in London.  They became defiant as they had no money to live on and were still poor.  Kippie Moeketsi in South Africa had a breakdown and died in 1983.  He was greatly admired in South Africa, especially by the young blacks and his name lives on for he was a remarkable talent, but perhaps too defiant.  Still one must have bread to eat. 

Amongst the women, Miriam Makeba was a famous singer who left the country as her fame spread and she became appreciated in the USA, known first and foremost for  her ‘click song’.  The click, prominent in the Xosa language, came from her roots.  Her voice was full and rich. With the birth of the new South Africa she returned to South Africa to help the black sisters and brothers.

Apart from the black people, there are the brown skinned, who were, when I was young, known as coloured peoples and no doubt have a new name today officially.  They are a mixture of all races, some from the island of St Helena off the coast of Africa.  When I held a large exhibition at the University of the Western Cape which, although open to all races, is mainly the university for coloured people, the Rector of the university was Dr van der Rees, who told me that he came from St Helena.  His parents were humble and deeply religious, had twelve children, and produced an extraordinary son whose talents in caring for others, have found expression in the western world and Europe.  Their printing department designed a very attractive brochure for my exhibition with a touch of art nouveau.  I will quote here from the exhibition called ‘Tapestry - a new Approach – balance of Hand, Head and Heart’.  Through a series of captions, with writings and tapestries, I try to show the various aspects of my work as a continuing thread.

‘My general theme concerns man as a machine, divided from his roots and man fused with Creation.  I am interested not only in the individual as a robot but also in the historical process of change.  In becoming a technological being, man has become more complex, full of paradoxes and multiplicities.  I emphasize “unity with dimension” in contrast to a unified one-dimensional man and I aim to celebrate an awarenss of life as one in all its creative potential. Evolution is not a popular concept today. I believe in evolution, according to the natural laws of the universe.’

I am often asked how I came to this form of expression.  My reply on the plane of inspiration is: ‘The African sky is filled with myriads of never-ending stars.  I looked into the sky and felt the texture of the cosmos.  Philosophical thoughts about the universe and about man played upon my mind. I saw image upon image and asked my questions. Here was such depth held together by unseen structures. I wanted to make tangible this intangible quality I felt, and my thoughts turned to this basic medium, which could blend together sophisticated thought with simple tools and threads.  For me, it was like bringing together in a cosmic pattern remote areas of experience by uniting the two ends of the poles.  It enabled me to take aesthetic leaps and to see in a new way.  The Milky Way, constant and never changing, in spite of ever-changing, made me feel the universalities as focal points of life.  That is how I felt in Rhodesia in 1958 when I came to this medium – when I felt a symmetry and harmony unfolding behind an apparently haphazard world.  And equally in the bundu, I was inspired by the curve of the never-ending horizon line as seen in the Matopos (Bulawayo); it links with memories of the veldt in the Cape as a child – for there is SPACE and there is TIME.’

It was on my annual visit to my flat in Bantry Bay in Cape Town, that awareness in relation to transformation and the ‘coloured’ people came again into my consciousness.  It came in a new way through the effects of technology and ‘progressive’ industrialization, that I then wove ‘Brown machine man’ in the chess board of black and white squares.  It became the eighth panel of my ’Modern Mercies’, worked unconsciously.  I saw I had woven a large jar in the chess board where the stick-like legs were.  Quite suddenly I became aware of a genie coming out of the bottle. Transformation indeed.  This was in 1976 when I spent a year out of Britain, returning home in August 1977 via Israel. In fact, I carried Panel VIII with me and remember visiting the Jerusalem Modern Art Museum while carrying the tapestry with me in a plastic laundry bag.  First, before visiting the museum, I recall lying on a bench looking up at the pine tree branches and then looking across to the building where the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept.  The memory is very vivid at that moment. I recognized the large jar I had woven into my panel VIII. Was this a connection with my genie coming out of the bottle?

My stay in Jerusalem was indeed interesting.  My daughter Angela was with me and my nephew Louis from the USA.  While they enjoyed themselves together, I made sketches of the old city.  Again working in series form, I wove into miniature tapestries later, the old stone building especially the archways, the doorways, the stone steps and the sunlight on the stone.  I stressed the dawn light and evening at sunset.  I became aware of this while looking at the landscapes of the Judean hills.  Remaining in Israel six weeks, though mostly in Jerusalem, I also went up to the Lebanese border and south to Eilat, as well as to Lake Tiberius, seeing the ruins now the preserve of archaeologists.  I saw the ‘loaves and fishes’ in mosaics where Christ had been, also visited Masada and bathed in the Dead Sea with a distinctly unpleasant smell from the sulphur. As a result of this experience I was able to make a drawing to illustrate the poem ‘A Letter from Masada’ of Edward Lowbury, published by the Keepsake Press.

In August, I returned to London from Jerusalem, after a brief stay in Lausanne, Switzerland, staying in a hotel on the lake, not far from the home of Karl Jung who lived by Lake Geneva.  Daily, I walked along the edge and sketched the many fir trees and others on the edge of the Lake.  The month was August when the death of Elvis Presley occurred upsetting many fans.  I returned home the 22nd August to prepare for my exhibition at Leighton House where I exhibited for the first time since completing my seven panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’ displayed on a seven-sided structure. Mr Hart, was the curator of the museum and Leighton House was not really patronized by many people.  However, my exhibition introduced Leighton House to many of my friends, very supportive of my exhibitions and buying my tapestries.  I also had an excellent response to my paintings of the changing mood of the sea, I worked upon while in Cape Town, and to my charcoal and pencil drawing, especially of the antics of my black green-eyed cat Romeo, who died after eighteen years companionship.

David Coombes of the Antique Collector (late of the Connoisseur Magazine) gave my miniature tapestries much praise, especially my buildings of this area round Holland Park.  The critics, of course, ignored it.  But then the feeling was mutual.  I found doing my own administrative work a bit too demanding eventually.  I received good write ups in 1981 (as in 1977) from The Financial Times under ‘collecting’, the Jewish Chronicle, Arts Review and Edward Lucy Smith did remark briefly in his columns about my ‘highly original ‘ tapestries.

Stephen Jones came to be curator at Leighton House in 1981.  He started to promote it financially, allowing parties and television crews into the beautifully tiled building – little respect was shown by the crews for this beautiful, if not interesting house which was given to the nation by Lord Leighton.  Often there were breakages. But Stephen did increase its poor financial state.  He travelled to America, giving needed publicity to this small and unique house, picking up generous friends and spreading interest.  He was an extremely talented man and very thoughtfully arranged in 1988 that the opening of Lord Leighton’s Library coincided with the opening of my own exhibition so visitors downstairs from the local council, came up to  my exhibition as well.  After that he left Leighton House to become curator of Spencer House, connected with Lord Rothschild.  Sadly, having made a tremendous contribution to the large Lord Leighton exhibition in 1996, he died of a brain tumour very suddenly on 1st June.  It was exactly the same time as I had my exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town.

All music is sound and all sound is vibration.  The materials that are associated with the instrument gives the sound, be it wood, glass or/and metal.  So that an orchestra which Gustav Mahler introduced on a larger scale of instrumentation could be a feast of sounds and colour, whereas that of chamber music, more domestic and less dramatic, established personal relationships in playing together in the intimacy of a home.  The small museums like Leighton House and the Irma Stern Museum provided that scope which served the local community well.

I have written about musical form and notation and using the plastic value of colour as a concrete material.  I gave expression to it in my series of the ‘Four Seasons’ in 1985 when it was exhibited for the first time at Leighton House. Then something wonderful happened when I exhibited the ‘Four Seasons’ for a second time in 1992 at Leighton House.  The first time I exhibited it in 1985, I showed paintings of musicians as well as tapestries.  It was commented on with much enthusiasm. However, on the second occasion, I received a communication in the dimension of therapeutic healing rhythms and I shall explain how this gave it more breadth and brought a deep communication to me. The principle of interaction through interweaving melodies and chords is obvious in music from its early beginnings. Music and dance rhymically interweave, sharing a universal language for all  to understand intuitively.  As an artist I tried to show this.  Through the metaphor of changing structures and contrasting threads to give texture, we see how it integrates the natural and man-made universes, particularly in my series of the 'Four Seasons' (1983-84) inspired by Vivaldi’s music. I felt the 'Four Seasons' was accessible as a series to most human beings no matter how limited their perceptions.  It united for me the natural and manmade in that I wove the manmade through rudimentary notation continued within each tapestry and within a varying symbol.  In the outer edge, I wove flowers, branching trees and fruit in the different colours of the seasons.  The notation interwove with the colours of the seasons and textures, woven in with the values I gave to the musical notes, using varying sizes and colour to give value as previously explained.  The set of four tapestries was placed in a  sequence with Spring and Summer above and Autumn and Winter below, all colours varying with each season,

A visitor to the exhibition told me she was sent by a friend who said to her ‘Don’t miss the best show in London’.  I was delighted to hear the compliment, adding, not according to the media who manipulate peoples’ choices.  She was advised to see it by a friend after she had just delivered a paper at Trinity College Dublin on ‘Multidisciplinary aspects in Speech and Language Therapy’ in July 1992.  This covered learning difficulties in children and she commented that my ‘Four Seasons’ tapestries would help children with these problems as it brings together aural and visual through sequences of pictures as well as different textures.  I quote from the pages she sent me because it links with my approach in a promising way and being au fait with case histories, she knew the validity in a broader way than I did.  It held a lot of promise for her.

I have always realized that series such as my ‘Four Seasons’ was a beginning in which I had just planted a seed in my form of expression. I hoped it could be taken up and grafted on to by future generations through future explorations even with computers despite the limitation in the loss of the tactile quality of threads.  The ‘Four Seasons’ was a good choice because it shows sequences of seasons, which could be represented visually with so much colour, and because of its basic quality of familiarity so easy for a young child to follow.  The child could then be encouraged to beat out the rhythm of notation through guidance from a teacher of music.  It could give cohesion and help in articulation.  She emphasized over and over again, using a picture story sequence.  Here the sequence was Spring represented by the visual music in a rectangle sheet of music, summer was represented by a circle, autumn represented by an ellipse and winter by a square.

Then it could be explained to the child why these symbols were chosen. The possibilities of a healing rhythm linking pictures with music – that is eye and ear – were there with symbolic play and cognition, dependent on the meaningful use of language utilizing the child’s own experiences.  It required a very aware and dedicated teacher.

In my exhibition later at the Irma Stern Museum in 1996, I exhibited a similar approach in a set of ‘Four Seasons’ in relation to South Africa.  I used different colours as they were based on the seasons in South Africa involving stronger colours with different flowers.  Spring had the orange and gold daisies of Namaqualand, the blues in the sky are brighter.  Summer had the colourful proteas and purple grapes, autumn had the cyclamen cosmos which I saw when I visited Johannesburg, and winter showed a landscape with ‘upside down trees’ and stones.  The series was, in size, smaller.  Again at the exhibition I had a tremendous response not only to this series but the whole exhibition with tapestries of musicians.

It included a flautist on the edge of the canvas; in fact, only half her body is seen and most focus in on her hands playing her flute with notes – squares moving in the spiral suggestive of the wind.  Next to this was ‘Chamber music’ with the central figure of a young girl playing a cello, again the focus was on the movement involved in the fingers of the hand and the textured physicality of the hand movements drew attention to the viewer of the hands.  Another tapestry had many hands plucking at the strings of a harp.  The hands were of all different colours -- brown, black, pink, white, yellow to suggest different races against a background of musical notes, inferring a time of transition for all into a new landscape of universality and diversity.

During the days of my annual visits for three months in the year to my flat in Bantry Bay, I used to listen to jazz programmes as I wove my tapestries and painted. Some tapestries I started while in Bantry Bay and completed on my return home and as my visits became shorter, I spent more time on them in London.  They belong everywhere as a universal language of communication for we live in a time of multinationalism.

I used the metaphor of music to show balance of hand, head and heart.  The flautist whom I wove not quite in the canvas but on the edge, shows less balance than the viola player in ‘Chamber music’.  They both showed part of the whole figure and were a preparation for the whole figure as in the series ‘ Four Children of the Cross’, a distinct universal symbol representing bits of the North, South, East and West.

It was at this exhibition that I met a young girl who had been in South Africa some two years.  She came out after she did her dissertation in art therapy at the School of Art Therapy in Edinburgh, September 1995.  It was called ‘Riddles of Subjective and Objective and Art Therapy’.  She gave me a copy of it as she said it totally interwove with my work as artist and on reading it I understood why.  Anna, the art therapist, came from a home where her parents were devoted to art, her father being a well known water colourist and her mother was into ceramics. Through my exhibition I met an un-ending number of people with whom I experienced a deep communication.

I recall and reproduce the reaction of a young student at the University of the Western Cape exhibition who watched me set up my exhibition within a huge space in the Department of Education.  His reaction to my exhibition was pure joy and most moving.  He stood in awe watching me put up the exhibiiton and then, at the end of the exhibition, he again watched as I took the tapestries down and shyly placed in my and a letter writing with a deep feeling that was straight from the heart.  Remember his first language was Afrikaans and he wrote it in English, which could not have been easy for him.  For me it is much more meaningful as true communication than the pomposities of art critics who must fill a space in the newspaper.

When I recently heard an interview giving people’s reactions to a Constable exhibition I was reminded of the freshness of their perceptions. Most claimed that Constable through his paintings opened up new vistas of the English countryside where they lived.  They started to see more into what was familiar. They spoke with joy about a new perception and it was not just about ‘marks’ on the canvas or brushstrokes - they saw it as a whole of colour, light and texture, with a new ‘eye’.

To sum up:  I have emphasized harmony and melody while aware of dissonance which resolves itself to consonance.  The dominant seventh must go to the tonic.  Polyphony is of the West and based on the tonic forming a chord of the third and fifth notes; the fourth and the dominant 7th cannot hang in the air but must be resolved to the tonic.

Haydn said ‘the charm of music is melody and it is this that is most difficult to produce’.  In the 20th century, composers say that dissonance reflects our modern times of transcendence – of enhancement as well as melody with harmony be it ‘pop’ or ‘classical’.  My aesthetic always harmonizes on the canvas to give continuity. When I write about the whole picture, I include the positive and negative forces of love, beauty and truth as well as injustice, poverty and fear. Symbolic of this is not only flowers and fruit but also the ‘Burning bush’ and ‘Dreaming of houses’ and ‘of home’ as in my ‘Modern Mercies’ tapestries  It is the universal dream for a better life on earth, especially in relation to the environment and to the sharing of the loaves and fishes.

In concentrating on strands of music I have written at times in an apparently undisciplined zig-zag style of movement backwards and forwards and not in a straight line chronologically.  I have tried to convey clarity and attempted lightness of touch towards which my work moved, involving textures, colours and mood.  This despite the seriousness of purpose in which I take my own path.

In conclusion I write what Pablo Casals, the cellist said:  ‘Music must serve a purpose, music must be part of something larger than itself , a part of humanity.’  I repeat this in relation to art.  Art must serve a purpose and must be part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity.  It should reveal and as such can only do this by communicating with one’s fellow human beings. Casals also spoke about how he feels about the sounds coming from musical instruments, which play an important part in my work.  He said when hears the guitar it speaks of love, of passion – carnal love.  When he hears the cello, it speaks of humanity; when he hears the organ it speaks to him of God.  He seems to have left out the violin – I hear in the violin of many different moods from the gypsy to an elegant refined mood.

On 21st August 1991, I took up my needles and threads to weave a large tapestry which I have never exhibited.  It was the time when Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait.  My mind went back to the biblical quotation from Exodus 15-20-12: ‘The horse and the rider were thrown into the sea of reeds.’ I wove this at the bottom of the tapestry where I show the horses of the pharaohs pursuing Moses leading his people across the red sea to freedom, followed by Miriam the Prophetess and her handmaidens.  The tapestry shows Miriam and her handmaiden dancing with their tambourines.  It is in colours of gold, forming the background and Miriam in a red flowing dress, the two other figures in blue purples and a yellow gold.  In size it is about 5 x 31/2 feet. Because it is Egyptian in feel, I must have had thoughts of Egyptians as in the background are profiles of Egyptian faces worked unconsciously between the dancing bodes. I only discovered this after it was woven and after looking at it for a long time. I used my own body as a model, taking up the different poses of the dancers.

From Africa comes accent on rhythm, melody comes from India and from the West, especially the continent of Europe, comes harmony and counterpoint.  Surely with all the disharmony in our modern world, there will be a search by young composers towards harmony and a lightness spiritually.  Remembering there are natural sounds and manmade organization of sounds, the two interweave, the more so the latter in which the human being expresses him/herself from what he hears and sees as in art.

The human voice is an instrument for music as the body is an instrument for dance.  Music has a spiritual value, a social value and also has a value commercially – think of the chart system in pop music, records and celebrity recordings of great musicians. As long ago as 12th century AD, a Chinese poet wrote:

O Music, great unity

Thou revealest thyself

As the totality

Of classical beauty.

CHAPTER IV: THE FAMILY TREE

In this chapter I write about another sort of tree, my family tree. I consider the painting with the drawing to be the most important project I’ve undertaken.

I have stressed the hybrid nature of my medium - craftsmanship with the aesthetics of a painter. This is a reminder that I trained as a painter in the fifties. In 1958, when I put down my brushes to take up needles and thread while developing my new form of expression, I never painted or drew again until in 1976, when I bought a flat overlooking the sea in Bantry  Bay, Cape Town, South Africa.

During the period 1976 - 94, I continued using the needles and thread medium, but I also painted and drew more and more until 1994, when the new South Africa was born with Nelson Mandela as President. During 1994, I painted in a looser style, using mixed media with watercolours and pastels. Then, recently, I decided to write about the development of my creativity, (before passing on to other worlds). It is very much the period of my metaphor, the sonata form’s return to a different key, to the recapitulation. Now to return to my thoughts and approach to my Family Tree.

The symbol of the tree must be seen in all its wholeness. For the essential nature of a tree is neither confined to its roots, nor to its trunk, its branches, twigs, leaves, blossoms or its fruits. The real nature of a tree lies in the organic development and relationship of all these parts, that is, the sum totality of its spatial and temporal enfoldment. It covers true space and time and is therefore an appropriate form for generations and, as such, is a symbol of dynamic life and continuity, depicting growth, development and metamorphosis.

Some years ago, in the early 1980s, Jordan Wouk, son of Victor Wouk of the American branch of our family, sent me a computerised version of our family tree, which must have involved much research. Jordan is a computer expert and I was struck by the downward movement of its presentation of the generations. This downward movement seemed so contrary to the life-giving forces. The generations are of time and space and as such, bring hope and light and should move upwards in structure to represent a family tree. Trees grow upwards, not downwards. I saw this as organic growth where it grows from the seed out of the mud and earth, upwards.

I know this is a very personal creation of movement continuing upwards towards the light. Jordan does not reflect a growing sequence. I saw it with the artist’s intuition and eyes. How did this come about? Let me set the scene.

In March 1992, while sitting in my flat in Cape Town (in the southern hemisphere), I started to look at the ‘Tree of Life’ tapestry dominating my workroom overlooking the sea. In a mood of awareness, the ‘Family Tree’ took shape in my mind, as I thought of my roots going back to the northern hemisphere in Eastern Europe from where my mother came as a very small child, as did my father, who stopped en route in London for a few years.

The ‘Tree of Life’ tapestry, I wove in 1970 after I wove the ‘Burning Bush’ tapestry. The shape of the ‘Tree of Life’ tapestry is like a menorah, a seven-branched candelabra, a symbol of the Jewish people. In the sixties, I remember seeing this shape being embroidered on a bedspread, hanging in the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Its archetypal shape reminiscent of the menorah struck me significantly at the time. I had completed two similar shapes in tapestries during the sixties, one of which I sold to a collector in Washington and the other which I kept for my collection, given over to my daughters.

The painting itself, was painted on a large sheet with a ‘tooth’ which I had bought in 1950 in Rhodesia. It was imported from London at the time. The paper had to be transportable as I had to take it backwards and forwards from London to Cape Town, rolled up in a tube. The size was exactly right for transport. It matched up to the drawing I had begun in London, the size being exactly 40 inches. The paper used for the drawing was too stiff for transport. It also had a ‘tooth’ and both had rough, curly edges. I used graphite of various shadings to diversify the outlines and lines to create modifying textures for the roots, trunk and branches as they grew outwards and upwards. The leaves of the tree were outlined in black ink.

The difficulty, as with the painting, in fact more so, was the balancing of the spaces between. I first made a small sketch while gathering information. What I had accomplished in this sketch was the branching tree structure with information of the generations in the United States and South Africa from relatives on both sides, especially descendants going back to 1825. In the painting, as they all came from Europe, I painted fir trees in shades of green. Prominent was the sea and swirling fish in memory of my father, and remembering that my mother had told me that the Saturday I was born at three in the afternoon, my father had his biggest haul of fish and this delayed his welcoming me into the world. My mother was not at all pleased. She felt he should have been at the nursing home - some of that sharing in the birth by fathers today, with emphasis on bonding. I don’t believe it affected our relationship. In fact I had a good attachment to my father, perhaps too much so.

The solution to the space problem aesthetically was to interweave spaces and images that would replace the leaves in the drawing when I started to make my painting, making it into a coherent whole with the generations on similar levels. Referring to the choice of paper again, I recall the paper used for the drawing was Bockingford 40 x 26 inches. The paper for the painting had more ‘tooth’ and was Whatmans. I bought it in 1956. It had a nice old look about it which I liked. It had aged a bit over the four decades.

Writing about the creation of the ‘Family Tree’ was a slogging job, but necessary and interesting. It gave dimension to the creative process. My mother’s parents came from Lithuania. Her mother, who carried the diabetes gene, was a wig maker and, amusingly, her husband had a brush factory. From photographs, he looked a much more gentle human being. They came to South Africa in 1880. In my painting, the head with the wig represents her, the brushes her husband, Abraham Jarburg, my grandfather. At the base of the first branch where the leaf of my mother was, she was represented in the painting by a book on which was written Froebel, for she was a kindergarten teacher, Fröbel -trained, and much can be learnt from his teachings to young nursery school teachers even today. I have her books where I read of his emphasis on nature. The book Child and Child - Nature by the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow should be given to educationalists today. For instance, she writes about a century ago:

“The personal services rendered to the whole” - and she speaks of society, the community - “in any circle of life, determines the worth of the individual to society, and moral greatness consists in the love which going out beyond the personal, seeks to embrace the whole of God’s world - and therewith God himself. For God has herein placed the destiny of man, viz, to expand from the circle of individual existence, through all immediate circles, to the great circle of humanity. In the world of the beautiful, we meet with the same law, viz,” - and this to me is very important - “the reconciliation of opposites”. This is the very basis of my technique in using opposite qualities of threads. Does not that sound like Jung in our century?

The great difference in ‘modern’ times is the invention of the pill for contraception for women, their emergence as an equal force and the difference in relationships with a deeper psychological understanding of partners with more tolerance, leading to intolerance paradoxically and coming full circle to harmony with understanding ultimately. The threat to our planet is much greater now than a century ago and the emerging generations are conscious of this and the needs of individuals living in poverty and on the bread line. Continuing with the writings of Fröbel, he says “a necessary condition of harmony is the balance of parts tending in opposite directions.”

I, a century later, have written, “I use the metaphor of music with dissonance (represented in our modern times by atonal music of Schoenberg) which separates and consonance which unites to weave a symbol of imbalance to balance.” These thoughts were woven into my image of the flautist on the edge of the canvas with tremendous focus on her hands and arms, as she plays the flute with snippets of visual music in the background. Whereas in my ‘Chamber Music’ tapestry, the young girl is more actively placed and the legs of a man are seen as his hands bow on a cello, representing of course female / male balance of today in an emerging state towards wholeness. Albert Einstein, in our century, has spoken in a wider dimension of understanding, saying that a human being is part of a whole called by us a universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison. How do we do this by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. But, of course, there has been a movement away from beauty in paintings, more an aesthetic which is distorted and downright ugly as well as banal, reflecting the different perceptions through the eye with little inner depth but pertinent to contemporary times. I took a great interest in his philosophical approach to education, especially when exhibiting at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where my exhibition was held in the department of education. Today, great emphasis is placed first and foremost on education to help the illiterate, especially as a means of fulfilment and employment so that the individual can become self-reliant.

My exhibition at Leighton House in 1992 showed the ‘Family Tree’. It dominated an entire wall in the second gallery, showing various aspects making the whole. At the top of the wall was my branching tree tapestry of the loaves and fishes. Below this, centrally placed, was a pencil drawing of my sister Ruth as a bride, on the side of this was a watercolour painting of my twin granddaughters in soft pinks, yellows and pale blues in an egg shape called ‘Birth’. There was also a pastel drawing of them aged three or four, picking daisies. Either side of this central area of the wall was the drawing on one side and the family tree painting on the other side. Visitors from the States, particularly New York, were extremely interested in the shape of the project and the names of well-known individuals and their contribution to society. Victor Wouk, inventor of the electric car battery and hybrid vehicle (EVH) was represented by the car. His wife, Joy, a social anthropologist by university training, and interested in a particular Native American tribe, was represented by their feathered headgear, as well as a crossword puzzle as she was a compiler for the New York Times. The painting of the lobster represents their sister Irene’s work as agent for my father’s lobster exports. In actual fact she, Irene Green, was a mathematician and physicist, a graduate of Hunter’s College. The skeleton represents her deceased husband’s work at the John Hopkins hospital. Her sons were doctors and the branch coming off their family branch represents their specialities  of psychiatry, oncology and orthopedic surgery along with the recognisable symbol of the snake. 

Returning to the lowest branch of this left-hand side of my father’s family, are his sisters. One son, Harry, is represented by UNESCO where he worked for a time, and his wife, Anita, was an eminent art historian involved in museum work in Eugene, Oregon. She graduated in Paris and is represented by a palette of different coloured paints. Her husband, Dr Harry Alpert, graduated with a doctorate from Columbia University, with a thesis on Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology in the last century, and became  the social science programme director at the National Science Foundation.

To return to the right-hand side of the painting, my sister, Ruth, whose speciality as a social anthropologist was the Malay community and black people in relation to marriage, is represented by husband and wife, the latter in cyclamen pink, sometimes referred to as Malay pink, and the husband with a red fez, showing him to be of the Muslim faith. I am represented by a painting to the left of her, branching off from my mother’s branch of hands playing the piano. My image includes a shell with a prominent spiral and colours of iridescence as used in tapestries; also the ‘Lotus’ tapestry hands with the circle of light, above which stands the machine man of the ‘Modern Mercies’. The circle of light is supposed to represent the third eye. Above, to the left and right, are two eyes. My husband on the left, my sister’s husband on the right, were both ophthalmic surgeons and we coincidentally both had the same surname, Sacks. My husband was very involved in multiracial politics and fought against the unofficial apartheid system in white hospitals in Rhodesia. Images of black women represent multiracialism. His father was an ostrich farmer, initially in Outshoorn and, later, a hotelier in Muizenberg where we met. Muizenberg is renowned for its lovely white beaches and sea bathing. Unfortunately I matured beyond him. Unfortunately, he behaved in a very bad way in relation to my money and family’s estate inherited from my father. I did not like him hitting my older daughter. I protested. As his insensitivity and brutal behaviour towards me became violent, I tried to see a way out of the marriage and petitioned for divorce in Britain. I was given it on mental and physical grounds.

In the painting above the eye, are yellow rings representing gold - money. My late sister’s husband, also has gold rings above his eyes. He, sadly, behaved badly towards me when it came to my mother’s will. She wanted to make me executor of her will but she was incorrectly advised that this was not possible. She worried very much about this and my brother-in-law became executor. Our relationship deteriorated because of this power he was given over me. The medical snake symbol is beneath his eyes. My mother died on his birthday, 1st June 1973. On the positive side, he did good work in relation to the foundation of Medic Alert in South Africa. From the image representing him in the painting, it branches out to represent his four children, three boys: Anthony, Peter, Richard and, a girl, Wendy.

They suffered so much when their mother, my sister Ruth, died and I tried to help as much as I could to help them but, not to take her place, only to do what she would do as their mother. Anthony came to stay with me when he arrived in London in 1944. We related to each other, particularly in relation to my work as artist. As I helped him to begin to know another life and perceive in a different way, he helped me when I went into a hypo condition as a diabetic. He gave me glucose and until this day, still phones me at 12am to see if I am alright. In fact, recently he realised I was confused as one becomes when going ‘hypo’ and phoned my daughter who, in turn, phoned my lodger (I have to have someone in my home) and he gave me glucose, instructed by him and I came out of the coma mercifully. This has not happened for a very long time because I am very carefully controlled.

Anthony is, in fact, a technological journalist for a top magazine. In the Tree, his hands are playing an electronic organ, representing his love of music. Wendy and her husband are represented by the ying yang symbol, Chinese in origin. They met on the Great Wall of China. Their brother Peter sadly committed suicide. He was a talented boy but unfortunately could not recover from his mother’s death. He is represented by a saxophone which he played, being like all four, very musical. Richard, similarly, played jazz, and has a degree in computing. He is represented by the image of a bridge as he studied civil engineering.

My brother, Harold, was a radiologist and is represented by an xray of a hand. He married Gunvor from Sweden. The timber represents the forests of trees she inherited from her parents. Their two sons, Sven and Leif were not close to their parents and in fact sought hard for their identity.

The Dome of the Rock represents Jerusalem, where my father’s brother, a scholar in law, trained in Minsk. He emigrated to the USA and he is represented by the ‘Burning Bush’, a symbol of social justice. I might add he came from Chassidic origins and lives a simple life as head rabbi of the Bronx community. He had in his possession books from the family from the 16th century, orthodox religious teachings which landed up in the Jerusalem library.

To the right of this image is his grandson, Herman Wouk, famous author of The Caine Mutiny, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel in 1955, and making the cover of Time magazine. He started off as a radio scriptwriter in Radio City and today is very well established, first with The Winds of War and recently with his books on Israel where he has established a charity in the name of his grandfather, the rabbi trained in Israel. Anyone requiring help to establish a home can call on this charity for aid, a wonderful sentiment to his memory. The Rabbi died at the age of 93 as did his daughter, Esther, Herman’s mother. Esther was herself involved in Jewish charity work. Herman met his wife when stationed as a naval officer in Okinawa, hence The Caine Mutiny with the nervous Queeg who, rather a complex psychological case, had a habit of rolling marbles in his hand. His wife helps him enormously as well as doing his PR, acting as his agent and is incredibly well read. She was not of the Jewish faith but converted to it. Herman’s book, This is my God, explains Judaism in a most unpretentious way. He had a wonderful sense of humour through a very observing eye. He is represented by his books and by a hand with a pencil in it, the hand of a writer. His one son, Joe, involved in law, is represented by the scales of justice while his younger son, Nathan, who qualified with a degree in literature and wrote his thesis on Great Expectations is represented by the book. 

Returning to the right-hand side, the other side of the Dome of the Rock is imagery interwoven with Janet. With a degree in Literature, and a caring person with a strong understanding of the psychological needs of human beings, she is a devoted mother and wife. She and her husband understand the needs of their daughters, Nicola and Natalie, identical twins which brings with it the need for separate identity, marked now as they enter their teenage years. Both are loving and creative girls. They are both outstanding at writing with imagination and, like their mother, read from a very early age. Sometimes they write a story together from their own point of view. In the family tree, they are represented by two abacuses, the one interlocking with the other with reversed figures - 5 x 3 = 15 and 3 x 5 = 15, the emphasis is on complementing each other. Natalie has a palette of colours completed by dashes of colours on Nicola’s side. Because they love the garden, each branch ends in blossoming flowers, with leaves that look like fingers of the hand to represent replanting the earth (an ecological metaphor of caring for the environment).

Janet had a great love for Beatrix Potter’s imagery of animals, and was keen on ballet represented by a ballet shoe. She worked in publishing children’s books and was the editor of Walker Books’ Snap magazine. Her favourite book, Henry James’ Wings of a Dove, is also represented. When I had an exhibition in Venice, Ralph Curtis and his wife, Nina, came to it. I remember his taking my hand and saying, “Promise me you will go on with this wonderful work”.  Janet and I were invited to his palazzo on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Barbaro. It was full of the painter, Sargent’s, paintings. They were related very closely and he had stayed at the palazzo, as had Browning, the poet, and Henry James. At the time, Janet was co-incidentally reading for the second time, The Wings of a Dove and we were led into the room where James started to write Wings of a Dove and described the green silk-lined walls of his room in the book. Such was the history of the palace, pulsating with vibrations belonging to the palace, it was an unforgettable occasion.

Janet’s husband, Derek, is a waterways photographer and is represented by a camera and a boat on the canal.

At one point Janet was researching John Singer Sargent and came across Richard Ormond, head of the Maritime Museum who had written a book on Sargent.  To her astonishment, she discovered he was also head of the Friends of Leighton House, making an extraordinary connection with me and all my exhibitions at Leighton House since 1994. In 1992, I exhibited miniature tapestries of the red brick Victorian building of Leighton House, the Arab Hall, the section of the inner hall seen from the bottom of the staircase and showing the characteristic blue de Morgan tiles. The most prominent miniature tapestry was the interior of the Arab Hall with its fountain, where I had to do a lot of craning of my neck as I looked upwards to the exotic dome with coloured glass. All this I saw as tremendous synchronicity. Why the Maritime Museum, I asked? I cannot make the connection but I do think of the sea often, and remember my father’s small fishing fleet with the old-fashioned 90ft sailing boats I used to climb into and explore below deck. I have painted the movement of waves so often and panel II and panel v of the ‘Modern Mercies’are interwoven with the sea and fish, showing pollution of the oceans. I also made a painting of this with tears rolling down the cheeks of the square-headed ‘Machine Man’. Fish are interwoven with my work as an artist in a strongly symbolic way.

In the family tree painting, I represent my other daughter, Angela, with an image of a house. She is an architect with an excellent job in management under the deputy director of the new Brighton-Hove Council with a team of architects, engineers etc and being responsible for all the properties of the Council which she takes very seriously. Extremely competent and hardworking, she is happily married to Diz Dymott, a structural engineer and now a talented cartoonist. So the ‘house image’ has lines forming a structure in it to represent Diz, whom she married 25 November 1992, just after I completed the family tree painting.

My father came from White Russia, from an estate called Bogdanava, outside Minsk. His mother ran an inn, while his father sang in the synagogue where he was the cantor. They lived on this estate which belonged to Princess Natasha, who later suffered as an aristocrat with the new revolutionary Bolshevik regime under Lenin.

[I, Janet Sacks, daughter of Miriam, is testifying that this story below about my grandfather is a fantasy. He left Russia to avoid conscription, like thousands of others. 27/6/2023]

There is a story I learned about my father who, in defence of his mother, when a drunken man made a pass at her, punched him and, in his drunken state, he fell to the ground and died. My father then had to flee the country, helped by Princess Natasha who hid him with his mother’s help. Incidentally, I was named after his mother.

His parting from his mother at the age of seventeen was very traumatic as he was devoted to her and, until his dying day, he spoke many a time about his adoration for her kindly, hard-working qualities. He never spoke of his father.

He came to London where he lived in Commercial Road, in the East End of London. After joining a synagogue for social reasons as well as for financial reasons, for they gave aid to immigrants, he bought a horse and cart to sell vegetables. He loved the Cockneys for their sense of humour and always spoke tenderly of those days in spite of his hardships for he was making new friendships. He graduated to learning to bake bread, working in a bakery for long hours. Then he left for South Africa in the 1880s, to join a friend in the fishing business. He became a citizen of South Africa and a founder of the fishing industry. For this reason, he is represented by the loaves and fishes in the family tree.

My father’s name was Abraham Marks, my mother Sarah Anne. I always jokingly said because of their names, Abraham and Sarah, God made a covenant with them - a sort of mixture of their sharing of the loaves and fishes as in the New Testament and the founding of universal man as in the Old Testament. A long time ago, in biblical days, God said, ‘And the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.’ So it says in Genesis. A lovely story which continues, ‘Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can - so many shall be your descendants’ - a very poetic image. Abraham undertook a hazardous journey as commanded, meeting wickedness all the way, he had a really tough time but journeyed on with Sarah to what is Israel today.

Just to make the tale beyond imagination, he was ordered to be circumsized and, at the age of ninety-nine, became a father. Sarah, his wife, beyond child-bearing age, miraculously gave birth to Isaac.

In painting my family tree, the generations are like constellations with shining lights, eternally giving hope through a sort of ‘be fruitful and multiply’ advice, utterly wrong advice today with the world’s problem of overpopulation. I do, however, see it as giving a sense of continuity. I see in my mind the planting of a seed, giving birth to the idea of ‘into the third and fourth, even fifth generations’, each new generation inheriting the problems of the last and tackling them with a new courage as transformation takes place in the desire for survival. My other family tree which I wove, is of owls representing wisdom. Always aware of human nature and paradox, I believe that creation is interwoven with the union of opposites.

In our age, Einstein, who created the atom bomb, paradoxically fought for peace. He loved the universe, revelling in its creation but knowing the world we live in as an uncertain universe. His contribution to science is the forerunner of new theories today. After the devastation of the bomb he, as a pacifist, formed a committee to fight rearmament, saying in his last address, 4 March 1922, that the older people look to the young and hope that they will strive with all their might to achieve the better world that was denied our generation. His attitude was part of a healing process. In correspondence with Freud, he asked what he felt regarding the annihilation of the planet. Freud replied that the constructive forces were greater than the destructive. So with thoughts of continuity represented in my family tree where the acorn grows into a strong oak tree in the shape of the menorah or branching tree, I confirm my belief that there are always these examples of creative people to inspire through their music, through the beautiful movement of dance and other art forms, all celebrating life.I identify with the Jewish festival of Channukah, known as the Festival of Lights. It does not say ‘forget your troubles’ but is a reminder of times of persecution of the most barbaric kind and of keeping the faith.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that in the fifties, I painted in oils but later changed to using watercolours and pastels. During the years in Bantry Bay, I made many drawings of the movement of the waves, using graded pencils from 6B to a 2B to get tonal effects and a rubber to create the effect of light. Sometimes, to achieve a fine line and leave lots of empty space, I used pen and ink in a free clean sweep of my pen, my images being mainly doves in different poses either scratching themselves or puffed up. The swirling gulls fascinated me and I made drawings of them in flight as well as on the rocks. I also drew in detail the view from my window of the rocks in the curve of the bay, some seen in more detail as shapes, others as from a distance with houses in the background.

Most important to me were my paintings in the mixed media of watercolours and pastels. This mixture created much more light in my paintings than oils. Again I painted the variations of light in the distant sky in front of my flat, where I spent three months annually in summer. That was January, February, March and later (as it became too hot) from March, a more temperate month. It was then that monochromes appeared on the horizon -  my skies changed in colour as twilight fell. I made a big painting of ‘Houses on the hill’ as seen in a morning light and then in afternoon light, reversing the shadows.

I made a large self-portrait, under much difficulty in 1981, sitting in front of a narrow antique mirror, a few feet away from my working table, where I sketched briefly my outline. My working table has a board on a slant. Working on paper 30 x 20 ins, eventually I completed the self-portrait, wearing my straw hat, sitting on a cushion while holding a brush in my hand. It was a very positive statement that I am a painter. The background shows lines of movement.

On my return to London from Cape Town, last year in 1999, while continuing to work my way with threads, I wove more miniature tapestries. I worked upon a series of wild life with which I was familiar and saw, having made many excursions into the bush, especially in Zimbabwe, as well as, what was then, Portuguese East Africa where we had visited the Gorongosa Game Reserve. I had often gone into the bush in search of cave paintings, taking the risk of coming upon a leopard. My series includes ‘A Lion at Play with his Cubs’, ‘Zebra in the African Bush’, ‘Birds’, ‘The African Eagle in a Rugged African Tree’, with emphasis on the bark textures. Most important is the changing light. One miniature shows a nesting bird against a sky full of light at midday. Another reflects colours of the sky as the sun is setting where I see my favourite salmon pink colour. Recently bought, was one with an eland in a fading light with the textured, twisting African tree familiar to the buyer, who now possesses eight of my tapestries, not forgetting purchases of gifts for friends, all of whom work in Africa. Their area of work being the third world section, attached to the United Nations. I also made a painting of zebra to bring out the ‘opt art’ markings. While working on the series, after the death of Princess Diana, I felt driven to make a drawing of her smiling face being lit by a candle in the wind with the cross on her shirt. The portrait is called ‘Candle in the Wind’. It came to me as I watched Elton John play the song on that sad occasion of her body at rest in Westminster Cathedral.

Then I visited the Japanese garden in Holland Park, next to which I live, and made a drawing of the Japanese lantern surrounded by leaves and under a tree as you enter the garden, a very tranquil place. My style became much looser with a more modern abstract touch of the background colours of trees in summer. I made a painting of the stone lantern reflected in the water. Then, because I am seen as an embroiderer, mistakenly perhaps, I took the same imagery of musicians with emphasis on the hands and painted the same hand movements as woven in my tapestries, but now using paint. I emphasised the hands as in the tapestry ‘Hand Movements on a Harp’. My conception was entirely different. I left more spaces on the paper with suggestions of visual music in the background by leaving empty spaces on the paper.

When using threads, I left very small spaces, only just seen through the many layers of threads, to show the base of linen canvas on which I worked, while building up layers giving a density. My tapestries are much more three dimensional. My visits to Holland Park encouraged me to paint the stone lantern reflected in the rather dirty water with emphasis on water and stone, which edged the paper at the bottom. The background of trees again I worked in a lesser abstract style, showing the colours as seen in summer.

My next attempt was the water falling over the rocks. I worked this on a much larger piece of paper which caught the quality I wanted to achieve of running water. My painting surfaces are flat yet in this painting of water cascading over the rocks, I managed to build up a picture of tonal perspective and blending of colours in gradations of tones, very much in the style of my tapestries. I know which tones are in the front of the pictures, setting the pictures in a receding depth.

I have seen in a strange way the same idea linking human development in a continuous process from generation to generation. All growth is based on previous growth. Hope comes through the fulfilment of the potential of an individual and continues with new beginnings in the birth of a child. I have tried to express this continuation of creation and perpetuation in my new series in tapestries, ‘New Generations’ (shown a tthe Rand Afrikaans University exhibition, 1991)

It was the painting of the ‘Family Tree’ that particularly interested visitors from the United States to my exhibition in 1992. A particular couple not only encouraged me to send my brochures and documentation to three museums in New York but actually phoned New York to find out to whom exactly to direct the documentation and the names of the directors. I did exactly that, sending a large package to David Ross of the Whitney who encouragingly replied:

“Thank you very much for sending information and colour xeroxes of your work to The Whitney Museum of American Art for our consideration. Although we are a museum dedicated to the presentation of American art (the very reason Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney created this institution) the curators and I carefully viewed your work. It is wonderful and intricate and I hope you will follow up this pursuit with an installation - either there in England or here in America - both suited to showing your work. We wish you the best of luck in bringing these to a wider audience.” (12th March 1993)

On the 17th February 1993, I received a reply from the Metropolitan Museum of Art saying, “I will be happy to keep the information on your work in our files.”

From the Guggenheim, to whom they were insistent I send documents too, the reply was equally encouraging and they kept all my writings for their library.

Nicolas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery, wrote an encouraging letter to me in 1988 in which he said in reply to my sending him my brochure of the Leighton House exhibition of 1988: “I have looked at your brochure with great interest,” I thought I would see his response in 1992 to my exhibition’s brochure of that year. It was devastating. This time I enclosed photographs of my Rand Afrikaans exhibition, all of which were lost. A reply came back, this time from Rosemary Harris who in charming style, apologetically wrote that the Tate was always interested to receive information from artists whose work was not European or American. This was untrue in relation to my work, having left South Africa in 1946 to live in Britain until 1952 and returning again in 1964 for London. In fact, I have lived 37 years in this country and my origins are European. My late father was buried in New York. My reply in return I reproduce here:

14 August 1994

Dear Rosemary Harris

I noted your comments and write, however correct or incorrect an impression my photographs may have given you, for you wrote: “Your work is obviously heavily influenced by your experience in South Africa and it is very valuable for us to view work that is not European or American based.” This is quite the reverse as to how I came to explore my medium and how my ideas evolved. For it was after a visit to New York and right across the USA in 1956, that led me to put down my brush (as a painter then in Zimbabwe) and explore canvasses in a medium I call tapestry, woven my way. And one of my first canvasses was ‘Robot’ now owned in New York. I rebelled, or should I say could not identify with the abstract expressionism at that time, nor the plasticity of New York but other experiences, such as my visit to the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum, inspired and influenced me to pick up threads of many textures, even to weave abstract tapestries which many consider my best work.

“My return to Britain from Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1964led me to develop my robot theme, which I call ‘Machine Man’, at a greater depth and led to my triptych ‘Man’ and eventually to the panels of the ‘Modern Mercies’ which I consider my major work as an artist. I am extremely interested, trained as I am in social anthropology, sociological and psychological matters, in the Industrial Revolution (and that includes the inventions) - and I owe my growth and development in my art forms and ideas to my living in this country where I have lived for 35 years. My work is multifaceted (with a leaning to dance as well as music) and, as a British artist I have a universal approach no doubt due to the many facets of my experience and origins. I see many young artists trying to do this today and I am concerned with major problems in our changing times which I try to express in my imagery - mainly wholeness which includes fragmentation and integration.

In this exhibition, I hope to place focus on ‘houses’ and ‘housing’. Houses include Victorian houses, moving on to modern houses which I made in miniature tapestries, becoming more abstract.

I am enclosing my Leonardo article which I hope you will read and would like to draw attention to the committee of scientists and artists who chose this article which I had to submit in Paris and which is now lodged in the art department of the State University of San Francisco. I think these facts should clarify the European and American influences I write about. They influenced my exhibitions eventually in universities in South Africa and in my last exhibition at the Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. The head of the British Consul, who opened the exhibition, very kindly referred to my work as artist, saying I was a bridge-builder and that for me is what is important as an artist.

PS  I am also trying to draw your attention to the fact that I am a painter. I enclosed photographs of early paintings which I painted while in the Central African Federation. This includes ‘Refugees’, a painting inspired by the Hungarian refugees of 1956 and just as relevant today. My ‘Family Tree’ shows my European origins.

I received an apology from the Tate but that is where our relationship ended as Damien Hurst’s eye-catching ‘Child Divided from Mother’ in formaldehyde took over. It reminded me of my ‘dogfish’ days when I took Zoology at university - cutting them up for different purposes and certainly more valid than his comment as an artist. Although I have heard it said that genius is to see the obvious. His sensational way of choosing to make his statement is unique and displaying little intellect, but a good head for money One has the impression that he is laughing all the way to the bank. For him, it is an industry of which he is very much a part.

At the time of my writing to Director of the Whitney Museum, he was very much involved in promoting and praising Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work as artist. A sort of resurrection came when he was given a show at the Whitney in 1958. With it came a frenzied rise in prices. His work began fetching abnormally high prices as he was proclaimed a black genius and named and likened to Arthur Rimbaud and Vincent van Gogh, even Leonardo da Vinci, who certainly are in the category of genius. Then followed a free fall in prices in the late 1980s, in the contemporary art market.

In 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat was found dead of an overdose in his studio in lower Manhattan. Drugs ruled his life and looking at his pictures which had a pretence of African influence, I was far from impressed. I know African art and culture very well, not only because I lived in southern Africa, but because I am a social anthropologist and artist involved with their creativity from early days. In fact, I was invited to attend a PhD seminar with the leading social anthropologists such as Elizabeth Colson, Hans Holleman, and Marc Gluckman (now deceased) of Basutoland fame and later Manchester. It was because of the African influence in my work, interwoven with technology, which led me to create new forms in tapestry.

Regarding Jean-Michel Basquiat, no other artist received such privileged attention after his death except for Andy Warhol, both part of the game played by art dealers then and now. They are both part of art history. In that way they are important in reflecting the times although I do not appreciate the aesthetic value of their imagery having an eternal ring. It has a relative value. Andy Warhol in particular uttered certain truths, especially when he spoke of his factory producing his imagery, and more so when was quoted as saying, ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ Time will tell. Regarding publicity, in the huge catalogue costing a fortune but rewarding in its publicity, opinions were given by six experts in essays for Jean’s retrospective exhibition. It was a well-known fact that this poor young artist suffered from a very bad relationship with his father, the basis of his instability yet, in the catalogue, this high-minded, well-dressed father was given a different image. The young painter spoke of his brutal father and he ran away from home at fifteen when his father found him smoking pot in his bedroom. The catalogue includes the following quote which I find nauseating as a comparison.’Since slavery and oppression under white supremacy are visible sub-texts in Basquiat’s work, he is close to Goya as American painting has ever produced’. Unbelievable trash which just shows you can write anything and set the standard by producing a flashy catalogue. Yet I do believe he sincerely believed in what he wrote, and I daresay Basquiat had talent, if ordered and trained with discipline would have developed into acceptable art in time.

But, of course, it was the celebration of his youthful death at 27 years old that encouraged all the hype. Only Robert Hughes, an excellent and knowing art critic whom I greatly respect, dared to write, ‘There is more bad faith attended to the cult of Basquiat, than any painter that I’ve ever heard of in this century in America - it has become farcical.’

I am devoting much writing to Basquiat. His work does not merit it. I do so as it is an excellent reflection of the mafia art market and the manoeuvrings of art dealers, and it coincides with events and thoughts in my own life which led me to be informed more and more about this greedy art market, particularly in the States. He certainly could not draw - scribble ‘yes’ - a great advantage in the art world today, but I believe I am old-fashioned to believe, as Käthe Kollwitz said, that ‘to draw is the basis of becoming a good artist and long before the expressionist days of the “thinker”, Ingres, a great French artist whose nudes are famous, said, “Go on drawing for a long time before you think of painting”.’ But then that is old hat and not of modern times, when you make marks on the canvas with paint. I draw more and more now in monotones with pencils and use pastels for colour. Certainly, I repeat in Basquiat’s case it was a distinct advantage, giving him a big plus sign in the art market with new odd ideas. His faces were hideous with no depth and quite unlike Goya’s dwarfs, which reflect a dark side in his deep perceptions of human beings. He could draw and paint with an astounding beauty which moved one. His faces had amazingly human expressions reflecting his terror. Look at ‘The Pilgrimage to San Isidro’ in 1819 - 23. The detail of his brushwork and the compositional detail was perfect. His simple painting of ‘Still life with Salmon’ is very satisfying in his use of paint. He is a great master, not a scribbler of work lacking form. His work shows amazing anticipations of the future in the 19th century. Looking at reproductions of Basquiat’s work, makes me ask the question, ‘Where do you draw the line between infantile and childlike, which is not. Infantile, yes. I should know for I taught children and learnt a lot from them and of their development.

Continuing the Basquiat myth of greatness, I discovered that a painter friend of Basquiat assisted him in turning out his paintings for a final show. He actually did not even do the work himself. The demands for turning out as many as possible came from Frij Baghoomian, his art dealer. He ran a place in his basement when artists in need of money finished off other artists paintings and Rick Prol was employed to fill in the backgrounds of Basquiat’s half-drawn or half-finished scrawls. Prol was paid fifteen dollars an hour to fill in metallic backgrounds, while Basquiat lay half paralysed from drug taking. He waited for Prol to inspire Basquiat to start working again. It was a convenient business arrangement. Basquiat’s retrospective was held in Spring 1992. After his death, the art dealer, Frij Baghoomian, the last one to see him alive, disappeared as litigation from the Basquiat estate loomed on the horizon. He never reappeared, being deeply in debt.

The story does not end here as far as I am concerned. A strange incident of synchronicity occurred as it usually does and I repeat it here with fascination. When I went to have copies made of my documentation to send to The Whitney in 1993, just before I left for my annual visit to Cape Town when I was occupied on my ‘Family Tree’ drawing and painting, the American girl operating the machine noticed Basquiat’s name. Speaking in the American idiom, she said, ‘He’s a dog. I know him well. We went out for a while’ I was taken aback and asked her for more. She went on to say he was a social climber with the right people in the art world which meant critics, galleries and art dealers - the whole poisonous atmosphere of the ‘80s’ interwoven with political correctness. His work is very easy to fake and that is what was being done. The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat seems to have died and I wonder if there will be a resurrection.

I write all this as a result of my 1992 exhibition at Leighton House and the interest of visitors, not only in my tapestries of ‘Modern Mercies’ built on a central structure, but also my African connections and the painting of my family tree and drawings with names of people they recognized. You must remember Basquiat was praised because of his so-called African connection and, being black, what critics saw in his work.

Now, five years later, the effect on me of visiting Holland Park’s Japanese garden was to take me into an Eastern area with an emphasis on water, the beauty of brushstrokes and monochromatic tones with paints. I started to use a calligraphy pen in the painting. After this initial painting, many images flocked around in my mind, but I only got down to painting this one picture, my only critic being my daughter, Janet, and she enthused very much seeing this deviation from my usual style. I also used pencils, grading the tones, focusing on running water and made these drawings as a result of my visits to the Japanese garden, followed by a new looser style.

I conclude this chapter by reiterating my belief in scaling down to size and commenting again and again on overblown canvases. I think particularly of Schnabel’s canvases of broken crockery. He took a great interest in Basquiat’s creativity as an artist. Schnabel’s work was very much of the eighties with a big exhibition at the Tate. I could not muster up enough energy to go and see it. His ideas were trite and his ego too large. His activity was geared to the art market out there. He soldiers on believing in himself and the art market which stimulates his creativity.