Mudflames
I painted Mudflames in Johannesburg during the winter of 2025, when the days are hot and the nights long and cold. In these conditions, oil paint dries fast enough to be brave with texture. When not painting, I'd walk the streets around my studio, passing dug-up slabs of concrete sidewalk or drilled out sections of tarred road – surfaces in the way of accessing a pipe the City needed to maintain. Some of these cavities had become flooded by clear, tranquil water. More often than not, the colour of the shimmering soil they revealed under the tar was similar to the ritual clay I use in my studio, where I combine it with cold wax medium and resin to make an oil paint I can fully respond to. Just like I did outside with the red Johannesburg soil, I found myself enchanted by the grit, the flow and the drying patterns of my ritual clay paint in the studio. Mudflames is a good example of this work, which I did so I could get closer to painting what I see with my eyes closed.
Jacob van Schalkwyk (ZA)
Jacob van Schalkwyk (b. 1979, Cape Town) holds a BFA in Drawing from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and a MAVA in Sculpture from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. His career incorporating painting, drawing, performance, installation and writing has taken his work to the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The Detroit Institute of the Arts, MassMoCA, the BAM Next Wave Festival, Central Park Summerstage, Irving Plaza, The Standard Bank National Arts Festival, The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, De Singel Arts Centre in Antwerp, The Briggait Gallery in Glasgow, The Edinburgh International Fashion Festival and the Salle Jacques Brell in Paris. His visual art has been included in the Neuberg Museum Collection, NY, the König Buro in Zurich, the South African Reserve Bank collection and the Nando’s/Hollard/Spier collections. The Alibi Club, his 2014 debut novel, was published in both Afrikaans and English versions by Umuzi/Random House to critical acclaim. He taught Drawing and Painting at Stellenbosch University between 2016 and 2024, briefly serving as Head of the Fine Arts Department. Van Schalkwyk is a PhD candidate at the University of Pretoria, where he is the recipient of the UP Postgraduate Research Grant. His practice-led research engages with new knowledge obtained from archive detailing significant African contributions to the conceptual basis of gestural abstraction in 1940’s New York City. Van Schalkwyk has been represented by GALLERY AOP in Johannesburg and Suburbia Contemporary in Barcelona.