Artist Beezy Bailey celebrates his two decades in fine art production with a solo exhibition at Rosebank’s Everard Read Gallery. It marks a return to Johannesburg for the artist who grew up in Gauteng, but who has become a fixture in the Western Cape. The multi-disciplined Bailey is no stranger to controversy. In the early Nineties he invented his alter-ego, Joyce Ntobe, ‘in response to political correctness where artists are chosen on their skin colour in an attempt to rewrite our sad history”. In 1999 Bailey received death threats after dressing up a public sculpture of Boer war General Louis Botha outside Parliament as a Xhosa initiate.
With his current show Bailey takes his viewer on a personal journey in mixed media. The exhibition is as much a conglomerate of discarded objects as it is a gathering of discarded imagery. Bailey likens his method of creating the randomly composed canvases to a ‘dreaming process”.
By leaving Cape Town and coming to do a show here are you reliving your salad days?
No, I brought the family and we are staying at a lovely house of friends of ours in Saxonwold, so it’s about as un-salady as you can get. There’s a certain sophistication to the whole thing that is very new and exciting. I think working with the Everard Read Gallery is like having driven a jalopy and suddenly driving a luxury car.
What does it mean to ‘work with” the Everard Read Gallery?
I consider any artist working with a gallery to be in some kind of business partnership. They sell the work, I make the work.
They don’t filter the work in any way?
No, there’s no editing going on. Mark [Read] is very open with that. He’ll come in to my studio and say ‘I love that — I’m not so keen on this”, and then we won’t put that in the show.
But if you knew there were certain things that did sell well, would you paint more of it?
It’s the first time I’ve done a kind of series of ‘flower-falling paintings”, and it’s the last. I started getting worried that I was on to a formula and I’m extremely anti-formula. I was lucky because the inspiration kind of dwindled away and they stopped selling.
Why flowers falling?
Because I enjoy doing them and because they sold.
Before you sit down to create, do you first sketch?
No, that’s quite a traditional method, which I don’t really employ. I always, as I say, throw myself out of the window. I don’t work with a pre-concept and work with about 10 canvases at the same time, including a few drawings.
Then almost like a bee — excuse the pun — in a patch of flowers, going from one flower to the next, pollinating.
I will throw a whole pot of paint across the canvas, then drag a giant palette knife across the surface. I will then scribble something on it — I will start to see in the rough marks the images that will emerge.
When you take on political subjects — which, in this show, are few and far between — like the arms deal or the idea of the new millionaire class, do you take it on because you are relating directly to some anger?
I think, inevitably, stuff is going to come up. It’s not all political but I think a lot of it has to do with humour. For me it’s important to have humour and to make a political comment while being humorous. My arms dealer has got a very apologetic expression on his face while he holds a new corvette, which happens to be made from a plastic juice bottle I found on the beach, washed up from a ship. The Previously Disadvantaged Millionaire I only named after looking at it; I suddenly realised who he was.
In your younger days did you court controversy?
I didn’t have to. I think it was inevitably thrown up from what I was doing. I think my best point of course was Joyce Ntobe, and my redoing of Louis Botha as a Xhosa initiate, when I got my first death threat. I thought that was quite an achievement. I think for an artist to get a death threat is quite exciting, if you survive it. What I like about Ntobe is that it’s like being an actor, except in a piece of visual art. It releases me from being Beezy.
This show is not about Beezy the controversial.
No. It’s not trying to be clever. It’s not trying to court controversy in any negative sense of the word. I see this as my first mature body of work. I see this an achievement of being an artist for the past 20 years.