by Angie Brenner
“My long walk has not yet ended.”
Nelson Mendela
We had expected to be moved, maybe even outraged, when invited to attend a private viewing of Nelson Mandela’s lithographic drawings at the J. Alexandra Galleries in La Jolla, California. What couldn’t have been anticipated was the collective sense of hope and empowerment our group of twenty or so San Diego patrons of African art experienced.
While gallery owner Diane Haman poured mimosas, we stood in front of Mandela’s drawings and wondered how this gentle man had endured years of torture at the hands of his fellow countrymen and come out on the other side with dignity and the will to move peace to the highest level of humankind?
As South Africa’s first Black president, he was able to bring about the changes he sought. “One man, one vote,” has always been his mantra.
But who knew Mandela could draw?
Even he didn’t, says the exhibit’s spokesman Ben Cook, a bright, young Australian who tells us that it was Mandela’s publisher, inspired by the line drawings of John Lennon, who first came up with the idea. It was a commercial endeavor from the beginning to bring awareness of the power of peace to a new generation, and income for Mandela’s large, extended family and his many humanitarian projects throughout South Africa. Projects like MaAfrika Tikkun., the organization that means Mother Africa; and the Jewish word, tikkun, transformation. MaAfrika Tikkun provides
academic, nutritional, agricultural, and health education to local African communities.
Cook, who was hired to take Mandela’s work to galleries around the world, tells us that Mandela spent several months with an art tutor learning to sketch. The result is seventeen prints, most of which depict scenes of Robbin Island Prison in South Africa where Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven imprisoned years in a seven by seven foot cell.
In his drawings called the Struggle Series, we see a panel of five charcoal sketches: a raised, defiant fist, ‘Struggle’; chained wrists, ‘Imprisonment’; chains broken, ‘Freedom’; hands clasped in peace, ‘Unity’ (Mandela’s chalk-mark on all his drawings); an adult and child’s hands clasped together ‘Future.’
“These sketches not so much about my life as they are about my own country,” says Mandela. “I drew hands because they are powerful instruments, hands can hurt or heal, punish or uplift. They can also be bound but a quest for righteousness can never be repressed. In time, we broke loose the shackles of injustice, we joined hands across social divides and national boundaries, between continents and over oceans and now we look to the future, knowing that even if age makes us wiser guides, it is the youth that remind us of love, of trust and the value of life.”
It took Mandela three months to create all the drawings, Cook says, and another three months to sign the fifteen thousand lithographs.
The drawings of Robbin Island Prison almost appear to be lifted from a traveler’s journal. There’s a watch tower colored in bright ochre surrounded by barbed-wire against a sunny sky, a room of a row of beds covered with emerald-green blankets, and an outside view of the stone prison walls against a blue ocean. Even the primitive toilet inside a tiny barred cell is painted in a bright yellows and reds.
Mandela thought his drawings were too stark, too harsh without color. “We can choose to live life in black and white or in color,” he has been known to say. He added color as a celebration of hope and the positive light in which he believes has sprung from tyranny of oppression.
Much of Mandela’s life seems cloaked in irony. We are told the story of the young woman, Varenka Paschke, whom he chose to be his art tutor. The woman, the granddaughter of P.W Botha, the former Prime Minister of South Africa and the one responsible for Mandela’s ongoing imprisonment, asked him if he understood who she was. Mandela had said, yes, he did, but could think of no better way for reconciliation then to have them work together. It is this belief in the power of love that comes through in his art work.
The least expensive and most expensive paintings in the exhibit are void of color and equally the most moving. In the first, Mandela dipped four fingers in black paint and simply drew bars on white paper. Under this, an exact replica of the key to Mendela’s Robbin Island’s cell number five has been mounted.
The lithograph in this exhibit with the highest price tag ($32,000. and three had already been sold) was made by accident when Mandela placed his hand in wet ink. The idea of hand prints however intrigued him and he began to make several images. Only later did an assistant point out the iconic image inside the right hand print of the painting now in front of us. In the center of Mandela’s right palm shows a clear silhouette of the African continent.
The six and a half foot Mandela will turn 90 next year. He walks slower, his hands now arthritic. He will never paint again. The original plates of his drawings were destroyed, and fourteen of the fifteen thousand drawings have already been sold for a total of one-hundred million dollars, making Mandela the most commercially successful artist of the twentieth century.
He laughs, Cook says, with such titles of political activist and prisoner, Nobel peace laureate and president, at the idea of being thought an artist.
When I leave, Haman hands me her gallery business card with its logo of an abstract pyramid and swirl. An ancient Hawaiian symbol she says. “It means a wave of light that makes you gasp.”
Yes of course, I think, like hope.
The Nelson Mandela exhibit will be featured through September 2007
www.jalexandergalleries.com
J. Alexander Galleries
1298 Prospect
La Jolla, CA
858-454-7110
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