For Free State artist Frans Claerhout ‘capturing the sun’ had a special meaning, and it’s revealed in the humanity and compassion in his works.
I’m looking for the sort of subjects favoured by the Belgian-born, Free State artist Frans Claerhout: donkeys, sunflowers and ‘madonnas with children’. My father and I are heading towards Tweespruit, where Claerhout worked as a Roman Catholic missionary, venturing over roads I’ve never been on before.
A maroon blanket drying on a fence around a hut catches my eye and I stop the car. My father looks at me, puzzled.
“I just want to get a shot of this,” I say, digging out my camera and nodding towards the blanket. “He seemed to use this deep, earthy maroon in many of his paintings.”
My father’s puzzlement turns out to be accurate.
The blanket doesn’t make the best picture after all. But behind it I notice a small child playing with a toy truck on the hard-baked earth. I climb impulsively over the fence and the child runs to its mother, clutching the truck. I immediately recognize a Claerhout portrait unfolding before me.
I ask the mother wrapped in a blanket speckled with white stars and moons, to pose with the child. My father shouts something from the car about making sure I get the background in. I do. Feeling good about the portrait – but bad about trespassing – I offer the young mother a R10 note and leave her in a good mood.
The mother and child portrait is, like much of Claerhout’s work, an intimate and potentially difficult subject, so I’m pleased our journey has got off to such a serendipitous start.
“It’s interesting,” I say to my dad, as we drive on, “that Pierneef and Tinus de Jongh painted empty landscapes while Claerhout usually crammed his pictures with people and their things.The landscape is often just in the background, or completely left out.”
“Did I tell you,” my father says, “that I met him once?” I shake my head. “I met him twice, but the first time was when I was still a child. My father bought each of us children a small oil painting from him. Both my sisters still have theirs, as far as I know.”
Years later my father bought a second painting from the artist, and was surprised that Claerhout remembered their first meeting and the pictures he’d sold to his father. The second painting was a portrait of three Sotho farmworkers, all wearing the classic local headgear of green khaki berets or brown khaki felt hats while engaged in that familiar pastime for Free State farmworkers – smoking.
Claerhout’s missionary brief required him to remain in the Free State for ten consecutive years, a restriction that forced him to miss his father’s funeral in Belgium. But he appeared to fully accept and embrace his new life. As a result, his paintings have a sympathetic flow, devoid of bitterness. His human subjects, drawn from the dusty veld, are seen as part of the landscape, in rustic agreement with the fiery tones of the land rather than in vain opposition.
Claerhout adds dollops of sly humour to already quietly idiosyncratic Free State ingredients. The simple, sunny beauty, for example, grounded in muted tones of struggle and difficulty. Claerhout admits as much. “Why paint landscapes when you can empty a paintbrush with women, donkeys and sunflowers?
Sometimes I find my paintings too dark; I quickly slap on a lighter colour (with a big fat brush) – and it works. It is like quickly wiping someone’s nose before they appear in public.”
We, on the other hand, are about to appear in Tweespruit. It’s my first visit to this small dairy farming centre with its huge, castle-like grain silos. I had been neglectful in failing to research both the town and the artist so we end up getting lost. On the summit of a small hill covered with country homes we discover a beautiful old sandstone church – that has absolutely nothing to do with Father Claerhout. But a local provides directions to a valley below and there we find Claerhout’s farm studio and whitewashed mission station.
After turning off the tar, I suddenly pile on the brakes. My father bounces up against the dashboard. “Sorry, donkey cart,” I say, jumping breathlessly out of our vehicle in time to capture another staple of the Claerhout palette. But why donkeys?
Claerhout explained it as follows (tossing in the odd Afrikaans term), “I am ekspressionisties. If you paint a horse, you cannot make it funny or with a long tail or ears, maar a donkey… you can make it long ears, and you can make them blue or yellow. It’s like a boerbok; you can give it a long beard and put its tail up … but everyone wants a donkey. Maybe I’m a kind of donkey.”
Sure enough, in the grounds of Claerhout’s mission station a sculpture of a donkey painted a vivid orange stands ready to shock the unwary visitor. On the opposite side of the grounds is another donkey, this time enormous, a sacred white beast with a Bible-toting rider.
The exaggerated features of Claerhout’s subjects – big hands, big eyes and lips – consistently convey an honest, expressive compassion.
TV producer Esté de Klerk, who came here several times, recalls, “Claerhout’s black and grey Labrador cross, Sa-Sa, waiting at the gate to greet me. The dog accompanied me to the front door where Father waited. ‘Come come,’ he always said, with an outstretched arm and a wink. He would settle into his purple sofa and we’d talk for hours.” Dozens of people, many claiming friendships with the artist lasting several decades, tell exactly the same story.
Esté remembers interviewing Claerhout in 1999, at his home. Sitting on his beloved purple sofa, he said, “What is the best, what is the climax – the mountain or the valley? Both make the landscape. I am a priest but I am also an artist, and I have always combined the two. I am one and the same, Father Claerhout – priest and painter. Not two sides of a piece of bread but the whole piece.”
On the importance of colour; Claerhout said, “Colour should come naturally, otherwise you are lying, and the biggest sin in art is lying.” Initially he stuck to a simple brew of rich earthy browns, yellows and reds, the Free State’s muted tones resonating with his Flemish roots. But later in life he suddenly changed, adding bright yellow sunflowers or shining white birds or brilliant blue skies – and a jovial vitality – to his pictures.
In her Art & Artists of South Africa, Esmé Berman describes Claerhout’s oeuvre as “symbolising a simple, sober way of life”. In one painting, “two donkeys, encircled by the camp’s fence … are symbolically central to the composition, their role essential to the day-to-day survival in this tough environment.”
Just 30km away is the tiny hamlet of Excelsior which earned notoriety in the early 1970s when 19 of its citizens were charged with breaking the Immorality Act. The event formed the basis for Zakes Mda’s book The Madonna of Excelsior, and in one review of the book (on amazon.com) the writer refers to “the Belgian priest-artist living in the region…fascinated by black ‘madonnas’ who sit for him in all their nude loveliness and grace.”
Why paint landscapes when you can you can empty a paintbrush with women, donkeys and sun flowers?
Mda explains how “the voice I used in the novel was a result of my engagement with Frans Claerhout, who relished in painting the vast landscapes of the Free State and the forlorn figures in them. Each chapter opens with a description of a painting.
And the figures in the paintings become the characters in my story.The humour and compassion in Claerhout’s paintings is transferred to my fiction.”
We go to Excelsior and providence brings us to a colourful, slightly ramshackle building. Here we meet Rina Els. Noticing the eccentric interior of her house (shoes on ceilings, walls festooned with artistic oddities), I ask her if she knows anything about Father Claerhout. Does she ever! It turns out Rina was one of his dearest friends.
Each year in late February, Rina says, she organises a Claerhout Festival in the little town. She points to Claerhout’s paint-splattered telephone. A glass case on the wall of Rina’s Pallecan Gallery shows the white-haired, heavy-browed painter beside a small collection of his brushes. Rina shows us a lifesize portrait of herself that she says Claerhout gave her. The gaudy yellow flowers sploshed all over it don’t ring true, but my doubt turns out to be unfounded. However; doubt over the authenticity of a Claerhout these days is by no means unfounded.
In an August 2011 episode of Carte Blanche, Bloemfontein art dealer Rosa Jonker and her brother were accused of allegedly selling thousands of fake Claerhout ‘originals’ accompanied by certificates of authenticity. In some cases it was said the fakes were dispatched with the paint still wet. Art experts such as Dr Fred Scott described them as ‘horrendous’, yet a cursory search on BidOrBuy.co.za shows that fake Claerhouts, especially those ‘painted on very thick paper’, are still in circulation at R5 000 a piece.
Rina, meanwhile, is a treasure trove of anecdotes about Claerhout, and through them his warm, personable spirit emerges. Speaking in folksy Afrikaans, a tongue she shared with the artist, she passionately imparts Claerhout’s own description of a night when he was stranded by a puncture under the Free State’s starry sky. The artist and his companions sang into the awesome stillness, a stillness which he described to Rina as a saligheid (a term for which there is no precise English equivalent, though ‘blessedness’ and ‘blissfulness’ come close). “He loved being here in the Free State,” says Rina.
From Excelsior we drive back towards Thaba Nchu, where Claerhout built a church. We finally find the lovingly constructed building with its numerous, stained glass windows and murals — another work of art. It’s clear that Claerhout put tremendous effort into giving back to the community. In fact, he once compared his life’s work to being a breadwinner for a household, “except I am a breadwinner for the church”. Accordingly, though his works are individually worth tens of thousands of rand, some approaching R100 000, Claerhout died penniless having given all to the church.
Rina, it turns out, was with the artist on the Monday night before his death in July 2006. She recalls they had a heerlike tyd talking and laughing about art and friendship and wonderful shared times. “I will always miss him, his wonderful sense of humour and love, but especially his humanity and strong beliefs, which made a person feel relieved.”
When Esté de Klerk, who produced the Carte Blanche documentary on Claerhout forgeries, visited him for the last time, he drew a picture of her holding a sunflower a butterfly fluttering nearby. “I will always think of him when I see a sunflower. Not just because he so loved them and painting them, but because of the sunshine that always sparkled in his eyes, and the lesson he taught me in how to live.”
The day is late but the sun is still shining when we drive back to Bloemfontein. It being winter; I haven’t found the third item on my list of Claerhout subjects: the sunflowers. But I am seeing the countryside, my hometown and the locals in a whole new way.
Claerhout was a man who travelled from a sophisticated foreign land to the dusty rural Free State and came to love his new home and its people just as they were, framed within the fresh divinity of big-breasted Sotho madonnas, vivid donkeys and saintly sunflowers.
He showed us all how to live an authentic life blamelessly connected to a community that could be inclusive (if only we could accept ourselves and each other) and to nature.
And in this, he found the secret to a lasting and fulfilling happiness; a secret to living he described once as ‘catching the sun’.
Let me think fondly of my friends
Let me nibble the soft
Pink buttocks of a child
Let me, when tired,
Rest in the arms of God
And let me from my mother’s knee
Go to Thine
Father Claerhout
Text and pictures: Nick Van Der Leek. Article from the July 2012 issue of Country Life Magazine.
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