Inside the spacious, white-walled Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg, the abstract works in the third instalment of Zander Blom’s compelling Monochrome Paintings series are, as the name says, strictly black and white.
Blom and curator Lerato Bereng have just finished the walkabout during the well-attended opening.
With questions done, the art lovers take in the works some more, and then start spilling out onto the rambling Parktown North house’s wraparound stoep with its lush green creepers. Some crunch-crunch across the brown gravel parking area — looking like a natural canvas with splatters of soft purple blossoms — straight to the bubbly table for a Saturday noontime kickstart.
Under a massive jacaranda in the corner of the garden, boeries are sizzling on a Weber, next to a table laden with salads.
Blom and I have managed to sneak away from the arty folks for an uninterrupted chat. Like naughty schoolboys out for a smoke we are behind the gallery, sitting flat on our bums, backs against the white wall.
The 42-year-old painter’s sweptback black hair has, if you look closely, hints of grey. He is dressed in a soot black suit, black T, black socks and black sneakers. Despite the early November mugginess he looks cool.
“It’s simpler,” he explains with a smile why his outfit is a carbon copy of his exhibition.
He lights a Marlboro Light and expands: “In my early 20s, I made a move and said no more colour. Remember those early Nineties slapstick movies about Ernest?”
Blom is talking about the inept hillbilly Ernest P Worrell (Jim Varney) who was a janitor at a university.
“He’d open his cupboard saying, ‘What am I going to wear today?’ And it is all just the same janitor suits.”
Laughter in his eyes, Blom blows out smoke.
“That’s the vibe for me. I want to focus on other things, and black is — it is just cool. It’s simple and elegant, and because otherwise it is, ‘Will I now pair yellow with orange?’”
In his entertaining and illuminating gallery notes, under the headline “Monochrome III: Thank You Gravity (and Students from Hong Kong)”, Blom tells us there has been a change in his Cape Town studio.
A month or two ago, a group of students came for a visit. Blom talked to them about the paintings in the room and then paged through some of his books, showing them the evolution of his work over the last 20-odd years, from ink drawings and prints to photographs of installations constructed with cardboard and other cheap materials in his Brixton bedroom to various styles of oil painting.
“Then I did a little demonstration of the monochrome techniques with my silicone tools so they could understand how the paintings are made physically,” he writes.
One observant student asked why he only painted flat on the floor or on a table but not vertically with the canvas leaning against the wall. Blom explained that his paint mixtures were diluted with a lot of turpentine and linseed oil so if he were to work upright the paint would run down the canvas.
“I also explained that I have a soft spot for drips and swirls like Jackson Pollock made, where the paint was flung at a canvas on the floor, but didn’t think that I would like paint dripping straight down because to my mind it would have such a specific feeling or connotation.”
And he continues in his notes …
“‘Vertical drips can be quite corny,’ I thought, and maybe said. But then, partly because I was now curious and partly because I wondered whether my answer made any sense to them, I said, ‘Let’s try it and see what happens.’”
Blom attached a small piece of loose canvas to a board and propped it up on the studio bin. He made a few marks, worked into them a bit.
“What I expected to happen happened, yet I felt differently about the drips of running paint than anticipated. I actually liked the effect.”
Once the students left, he did a few more experiments with drips and smears “allowed for a subtle shift in the monochrome works in general”.
“Some paintings seem calm and soothing, others violent and chaotic,” Blom explains in the notes. “None of them are static, there is so much movement.”
He writes that, despite his “preconceived notions, these drips turned out to be something I can really work with. Looking around the studio now, most of the recent works were made upright with drips and smears, and with each new painting another subtle variation has suggested itself into existence.”
Never mind the drips and smears, I wonder if Blom will bring colour to his palette again. He drags on his cigarette.
“Now that I’ve done monochrome for so long, and I’ve been thinking about colour more, actually I feel like I’ve handled colour kind of carelessly before. I feel like I’ve got two speeds: it’s either monochrome or it’s just like every colour in the rainbow.
“And I feel like if I do return to colour, I would make colour the star of the show.”
Blom tips the ash, looking like he is having second thoughts.
“I hope I return to it at some point, maybe never … But I think that colour is a distraction. Would be a distraction from exploring these forms at this stage. Does that make sense?”
I pose a vague question about the various shapes and sharp edges in Monochrome Paintings and Blom bails me out.
“I grew up as a teenager with skateboard culture and logos and stuff … I’ve always been drawn to like a hard line, like a hard shape. And I think maybe it’s also the metal [music and culture] from my youth.”
He explains that “if you have a round shape, it suggests something more organic, from the natural world. If you have something that’s a rectangle, it suggests something that’s more human made.
“If you have a straight thorn, it feels like it’s maybe a spike.
“If you have a crooked thorn, it’s maybe from a tree. So, you mix these things and some things maybe look like they’re technological.”
Some things can look like they’re alien, others can appear to be from the natural world.
“Something can be menacing and something can be soft and gentle — and so I think it’s like just playing with the mood of a composition.”
Blom says the viewer will have several questions when looking at his abstract works: “Is it moving? Is it static? Is it scaring me? Is it making me feel light?”
In this show, there are two large works with quite a bit of white in their centres, perhaps suggesting the viewer fill in the gaps, using their imagination.
“I love that line where Picasso said, and I’m paraphrasing, that if you finish a painting, you finish it off, you kill it,” Blom responds.
“I keep wanting to be more minimal, and doing less and not sheepdog the viewer, and feel like this is what the thing is, feel the thing.
“But it’s a weird little dance because you have to give a little bit of something but then it’s good to leave empty space.”
For Blom art is like a magician performing a trick.
“You’ve got to entertain the eye, you’ve got to give it just enough so you’re curious but not too much that you’re like ‘Oh, whatever.’”
At home in Cape Town, Blom would sometimes call his wife and fellow artist Dominique Cheminais to his studio and ask her, “Is it time to stop now?”
“And she’ll be, like, ‘Yeah, it’s perfect, stop.’”
And does he listen?
“I think I’ve got better over time at getting to that hill and seeing that what I’m going to add is just not necessary. It’s superfluous and it’s going to destroy the thing …”
The British painter Francis Bacon said: “You know, in my case, all painting — and the older I get, the more it becomes so — is accident.
“So, I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint.”
This resonates loudly with Blom.
“So, a lot of these paintings start off with, I have a plan — this is going to be like this.
“And then halfway through I’m like, wait, this magic thing that just happened here that I was just on my way to do something else … is way better actually than what I was planning.
“It’s that Francis Bacon thing of hoping for accidents along the way.
“It helps also to take that ego-mind thing out of the way and say, my brain is actually less interesting than the accidents that will happen in the studio — I just have to be receptive to catching them.”
Blom was born in 1982 in Pretoria. He grew up with an artist mother. His grandfather also had a creative side. When he retired he did woodcarving — “amazing mirror frames, oval mirror frames, like roses and things on it”.
That’s where Blom made some of his first little carvings: “Things like the Aerosmith logo, or Metallica, spelt wrong, you know, things like that … and then paint it and sand it.”
Trained in graphic design, his first works were drawings, paper assemblies, sound collages and photographs of unusual painted and sculpted sets fashioned by the artist in his home in Brixton, Johannesburg.
Blom has a great interest in 20th-century modernism and non-figurative, abstract art. Inspired by Piet Mondrian and Bacon — according to an entry on Aspire Art’s site — Blom seeks to challenge the limits and traditions of painting in his own practice, whilst also paying homage to it.
In the mid-2010s, Blom formed the quirky visual art collective Avant Car Guards with fellow artists Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry.
“We were young upstarts,” Blom grins. “We really wanted to be in a band but basically we were art kids.”
You couldn’t play instruments?
“Yeah, exactly. I could play a little bit but not enough to mean anything.
“It was like the time of the Blk Jks, Fokofpolisiekar, Lark, Stage Magazine, all that stuff. But the art scene was a little stuffy. We were doing our solo stuff but decided, ‘Let’s band together and do something.’ And that created a cool little energy.’”
But the fizz eventually went flat.
“After a while, our life basically just became like, go from our house to Rosebank to eat at Doppio, look at the secondhand bookshop. Come home to the house.”
Blom’s wife wanted to move to Cape Town to be closer to her family. He was reluctant at first: “I didn’t want to become a seascape painter,” but agreed, and they moved in 2014.
“And now, when I’m in Cape Town, I can’t be bothered to come back to Joburg but, really, if I’m here, it’s a cool vibe here as well.”
Earlier, during the opening, Blom spoke about the “heaviness” of doing art in South Africa. I ask him how he deals with it in Monochrome Paintings.
“I gave up on the idea of having to deal with that stuff in the way that I thought I should be dealing with it.
“As a young person I thought, ‘Oh, this is William Kentridge and it’s Diane Victor,’ it’s all these people that make very political work.
“But, what’s great about Kentridge is his whole thing is everything’s a grey area. There’s no black and white. It’s very like he’s a doubter. He’s a thinker — which is great.
“But I don’t have that kind of mind. I’m not … I don’t know if I can really speak about that stuff in that way.”
Blom admires political art but he is philosophical about it: “I can’t be this artist or that artist — I can only just be me.”
He doesn’t beat himself up though.
“Don’t go,” — his voice speeds up — “‘It needs to be better; it needs to be more this; it needs to be more that.’”
Blom exhales.
“Just let it be and just give it some time. And just accept that maybe it’s good enough. And it’s also not for me to decide … if it’s good enough.”
All Blom’s paintings are untitled, but for a numerical tag that situates each work in a timeline of his evolving practice.
So, his response to my question: “What’s your relationship with the works if you look at them now?” makes sense.
“Erm … It’s a little bit like a diary entry, because in that moment [while painting], I was, like, ‘Oh, I love this moment — I’m going to make another 10 of these.’ And then, three works in, it is, ‘Wait, wait, wait, this is the new thing — I want to do this thing.’”
Blom acknowledges it can be a jump from the one thing to the next.
“So, you also can’t be too, like, ‘Everything I make has to be my favourite thing in the world.’ These are just things you make because you can’t not make them …”
Blom taps a cigarette on the box and stares into the mid-distance.
“And so … I hope that my art means something to someone. Why else would you be making stuff and putting it on a wall and showing it to people, you know?”
He puts the cigarette in his mouth and flicks his lighter.
“It’s, like, this is the thing that I can do better probably than anything else. If I was in advertising, I would probably have killed myself by now.
“But, you know, it’s like … I made things like this and somehow the world responded.
“I made music before, but the world was like, ‘Ugh!’
“But then I made art and the world kind of responded. And it’s … it’s my job. It’s my J-O-B.”
He smiles.
“But also, I do … I feel like I’m making my parents proud as well.”
We return to those accidents Bacon talked about and whether Blom is more open to them now.
“I’ve always been open … I think it’s because I grew up with a mom where it was okay to play.”
For Blom, play and art are closely intertwined.
“You draw a picture of a car or a crocodile or whatever and the crocodile is rubbish but your mom’s, like, ‘That’s an amazing crocodile.’
“So, you get the pats on the back. By the time you get to school, you’ve drawn more crocodiles, so you draw better crocodiles than the other kids … so you get more pats on the back.
“By the time you’re in your early twenties, you feel like you’re allowed to do this thing.”
You’re good at crocodiles by then? I quip.
“Yes, and then also, I didn’t have the thing of, ‘You call yourself an artist, what is that?’”
Blom often talks about this “permission to do art” with his artist friends.
“I have a friend who started painting six years ago and he’s doing super well now. But he had to let go of this thing where he felt like he didn’t have permission.”
This friend grew up in a context where, when he drew a car, his parents said, “You’re not really so good at drawing the car, maybe you should try something else.”
His artistic impulse was killed.
“He had to give himself permission as a 37-year-old to start his art.”
In contemporary art, Blom believes, “play” is a bad word because everyone wants to be so serious.
“But I think play should be an essential part of all of this. It doesn’t matter how serious … I mean you can see it with Kentridge — no matter how serious the topic is that he does, he’s still playing.”
Blom insists there must be joy in making art.
“Otherwise, what’s the point? Then be an accountant, you know?”
Monochrome Paintings III is on show at the Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg until 13 December.
