LITMIR.BIZ

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One would chat to the shop assistant, who was not a stranger, and one could do so without someone waiting impatiently behind you for you to finish, curiously peering at what you had bought and silently criticising your choices.

      The city was a shock to her at first, and Cape Town in the 1950s was only barely a city. She said the thing that struck her most when she arrived was the number of poor people.

      ‘Picasso used to go hungry when he first moved to Paris,’ she told us. ‘He had to live on the smell of his oil rags.’ Picasso was her hero because he observed the laws but broke all the rules. His genius gave her the permission she sought: ‘To paint what is in myself, not what is expected of me.’

      ‘I don’t want to be taught and I don’t want to imitate,’ she explained. ‘I am a savage – raw, genuine, untutored!’

      I nodded. Would she now help me tie my shoelaces?

      ‘Paint anything you like and how you like on anything you like!’ This was a mantra she’d picked up from a Belgian artist and friend of the family, Herman van Nazareth. ‘He burns his paintings if he doesn’t like them,’ Mom said with frightening relish.

      When a picture was driving her nuts, I was always afraid she’d destroy it. I thought all her pictures were beautiful and I couldn’t understand what she was complaining about. But she’d lament: ‘It’s all wrong, all wrong!’

      The South African painter Leon de Bliquy told her that painting wasn’t her strongest suit, but her ‘line’ was exceptional. She was an Expressionist at heart, he said. She had ‘angst’. She should devote herself to lithographs and wood and linocuts. He offered to teach her, but nothing came of it; it would have involved too much equipment and been too costly.

      Of all Picasso’s oeuvre, she was most fond of his Blue Period – the fallen women and the pale, penniless artists. There was a print of La Vie on the big cork board in her studio and next to it Guernica. She also loved the pathos of Picasso’s Rose Period; his paintings of bony acrobats, forlorn harlequins, delinquent garçons, and itinerant saltimbanques.

      Night Fishing at Antibes was my favourite Picasso. It was colourful and funny. At first glance it looked like something I might have been able to paint, except, copying it, one soon discovered it was the work of a genius.

      My mom often depicted the labouring masses: roadside workers wielding picks in the sweltering heat; municipal workers bent and sweeping streets; a servant on her knees scrubbing floors; fishermen hauling in their teeming nets; women labourers in the vineyards staggering under the weight of baskets of grapes – the toil behind the Dionysian feasts she also painted. These pictures instilled in me at an early age an awareness, even a sensitivity for the downtrodden, which was unusual for whites back then in apartheid South Africa. She liked the down-and-outs – the beggars, the homeless, the waste pickers at the dustbins, the destitute people she saw, and the marginalised ones she imagined – gypsies, circus artists and street performers.

      When Picasso died on 8 April 1973, I was five, but I remember how a pall settled on our home, as if an old and dear friend had passed away. The critical biographies of him that were published later my mom considered meretricious and scurrilous. Two of the main women in Picasso’s life, Marie-Thérèse and Jacqueline, as well as his grandson, Pablito, committed suicide in the years following his death. Had they found that they could not live without him, or were their suicides because they had been so indelibly damaged by him when he was still alive? Later, I would ask the same question about my mother and me.

      We had a handful of books on classical Greek and Roman art, a few monographs of various sizes on Picasso, one on Leonardo da Vinci and one on Käthe Kollwitz. This last book was filled with the great Expressionist’s despair at war, even though the victims were German, a nation permanently tainted in the eyes of my parents because of World War II – ‘the bloody war’. Much later in life, my mother was slightly appalled that many of my closest friends were young Germans.

      My mother drew caricatures of the Nazis – Hitler as a phallus, Göring as a beast with horns, Goebbels as a harp with a fork-tongue (I think she got the idea from Jack and the Beanstalk). She also tried her hand at sardonic anti-capitalist cartoons, drawing monstrous factories that looked like giant skulls, belching smoke, chewing up workers and pouring black sludge into rivers filled with litter and dead fish.

      ‘This is the hell your father has to go to every single day,’ she told me.

      She did an ink sketch of a worker with his arm chopped off standing next to his wife and child. I could plainly see these were my parents. My father is begging with the hand he still possesses stretched out. The boss replies: ‘Sorry about your arm, old chap. Here’s your pay – 24 cents.’

      I picked up the theme. I filled a whole drawing book with factories eating workers. ‘Dirty, capitalist, Nazi-pigs,’ I chanted. I was ten.

      My mother painted about a hundred portraits, many of them self-portraits with double and triple profiles. One series was set to themes – praying woman, grieving woman, contemplating woman ­– but all were recognisable as her, even if she had three eyes and two mouths in some of them.

      My mother’s maiden name was Morris, but she signed her pictures backwards: Sirrom. Apparently, Da Vinci also wrote backwards. Sirrom was her real self, she said, not Shirley Meersman and not Shirley Morris either. But which one was my mother?

      ‘You are all the encouragement, the only audience I really need,’ she told us. ‘And your father encourages me more than anyone on earth.’ She dedicated her paintings to us, writing our names in chalk on the back of the boards – ‘for Pauli’, ‘for Brent’.

      Her pictures were the most precious things in the house to me. Her wild horses were my favourites, perhaps because I remembered a rocking-horse I had as an infant, but this might have been a memory planted by a photo my father took when I turned one.

      She did many unflattering, cubist pictures of Papa; a few watery, sad, idealised ones of us kids, almost elegiac. She painted me in golden yellow watercolours, like an angel. But when I looked at it, it felt as if it was a painting one might have done for a child who had died. Besides, I was no longer that innocent boy. She had painted what had already passed by the time I was six.

      There was one group of paintings she never displayed. She kept them behind a chest of drawers, stacked facing the wall. These were the ones she called ‘weird’. She said she didn’t wish to be reminded of them. But I couldn’t resist. When she was having a lie-down, I’d go and look. The boards were covered in paint – a wild, messy, churning palette of colours, muddied here and there – and she had etched into it with the back of a sharp object chimerical monsters, trees and rocks with unnerving faces, drowning wraith-like figures with their arms outstretched sinking to the depths of thick, green oceans. I was mesmerised by them. I could not understand why she hid them any more than I could fathom why she became angry with a beautiful picture.

      ‘What’s wrong with them?’ I asked. ‘They’re beautiful.’

      She didn’t reply. She had a strange look – both wary and weary.

      She shared her talent with us. She used the cardboard backs of her used-up drawing books and watercolour blocks to make colourful drawings of cowboys. She’d cut them out as paper dolls for us, each standing about a foot tall. The dolls argued and spoke to one another and had adventures together. I wasn’t making up voices for them but trying to impersonate the voices I imagined they already possessed. For me, her paintings had truly come to life. I tried my best to preserve the figures, but at some point, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok and Davy Crockett would inevitably get bent or torn during their wild adventures. I’d beg her to do some more. It could take a while before she could bend herself to oblige. I had to nag.

      ‘You can’t tell an artist what to draw,’ she’d say indignantly. ‘I’m not an illustrator! Commercial artists and fine artists are poles apart!’

      But some years later, when I was nine, she did illustrate the stories I was then writing. I thought her pictures just as good if not better than the ones in the Biggles books I borrowed

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