people-from-cape-town

"a few characters I played on stage are some of my memorable characters"

"⁠I always aim to be as truthful to the character. It helps if you don’t judge your character"

"Theatre allows for great ensembles"

"To the new actors, show up and commit. Do as many varied projects as possible because there is no such thing as a small role"

"Theory is part of the romance of archaeology and is vital if we want to breathe some life into the snippets of information drawn from stone and other artefacts."

"The reason why much of Stone Age history has remained a secret for so long is not that it may not be told or that it has not been told in other books, but rather that it has to be individually discovered. Because we are remote from the past, we have to find it and immerse ourselves in it, if we wish to understand it and unlock its secrets. Pursuing the past is rewarding, and we hope it is a challenge more will follow."

"Going to a mixed race university with a small number of black students was a real eye opener for me! I was rudely awakened to the terrible inequality and brutality of the apartheid and racism in South Africa at that time and was quickly swept into the exciting world of student politics"

"At that time there were no art colleges or galleries in Lusaka and nothing really to talk about in art. Fortunately just after we arrived I was introduced to the Lusaka Art Society where I attended a meeting and was made secretary"

"I made up my mind to make a contribution to the development of the then new country when we arrived in Zambia in 1965"

"President Dr. Fred M’membe has eulogised late Cynthia Sara Zukas for her selfless service and love saying she was like a parent to most of the people."

"I am delighted that the Queen has recognised the services of Mrs Cynthia Zukas in promoting art in Zambia and internationally. Mrs Zukas deserves the award as her hard work in the development of the arts has touched many people and received national and international recognition."

"Simon and I had a lot in common and we worked together on various committees such as the movement for Colonial Freedom and anti-apartheid movements. We fell in love and got married in January 1954. I settled down to become a full time housewife and mother. Our two children were born in 1955 and 1957 respectively"

"This was detrimental to my art studies and I had to repeat a year before I got my degree"

"I am not thinking of a cut-off point yet"

"And after that I always tried to do that with every show and every album, there are no throw-away songs and they must all stand strong"

"I have a sort of thought process I go through. And what I normally do with my accompanist is that we will talk through the whole show beforehand. You go through every song and we say, oe be careful of that part, and that part and remember to do that there and so on. You get all those things out of the way and it’s filed in your brain, so by the time you walk on stage you actually do it for the second time"

"Terribly! Yes, yes, yes, and also, it’s quite important for me to be nervous, because if I’m not then it feels like it doesn’t matter enough"

"It depends on what crosses my path, rather than me initiating it. And sometimes the chemistry between you and a musician is just perfect and then you just go with it"

"I lived in many different places as I was growing up. This gave me an awareness of difference, the understanding that security cannot be found in the outside world."

"There is relief in dwelling in a not-new picture, in embracing the foolishness of the formula, in discovering the beauty of each small detail that is woven into the picturesque whole. And while we are there, noticing the leaves, the clouds, the way the paint has described the folds of silk, perhaps something indescribable can be felt."

"Who cares if you can paint something that looks real? It is totally banal. There is no worth in that, except as a kind of sport, an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination. Now painting something that seems to contain reality – that is truly moving."

"I have just carried on doing what I did as a child. It’s been one long continuous stream of making pictures to feel a sense of connectedness. Painting this way is a wordless exclamation….Sometimes people get cross with it because they hate that it’s not about anything, and that I just carry on with all this realism. This fiddle-faddle, this knitting."

"We were denied the experience of knowing what Nelson Mandela looked like. We were denied the experience of each other's lives." Still, "one developed ways around the system that were illicit but expressive . . . we all learned, as it were, to wiggle and squiggle."

"Searle pays constant attention to the social issues and movements in South Africa, such as xenophobia, access to housing, land and political protests. Her work is not reducible to simple poignant condemning. Rather, through her visual language, ripe with symbolism and narrativity, she creates the entanglement of poetic and violent imagery which captures the contradictions and complexities of South Africa."

"I don’t have a ‘feminist artist statement’ as such. Being a woman is only one aspect of who I am."

"The self is explored as an ongoing process of construction in time and place. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux."

"Without providing any definite answers, I think my work raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. I think it operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences - but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa."

"Viewing Poynton's work is a personal experience. The story that comes to your mind is different from that of someone else. There is no right or wrong. All ideas and associations are welcome in the world of Deborah Poynton."

"Her work often conflates tropes from traditional art history, from compositional techniques to poses of her subjects, and the indices of contemporary life to create a sense of chaotic inscrutability; in this way, Poynton creates work which is aesthetically engaging and intellectually confounding."

"While most of her work can be categorized as realism, a few series depart from her usual aesthetic in a more abstract project. Her current exhibition, Scenes of a Romantic Nature, draws on her connection to Germany by referencing the landscape paintings of German artist Caspar David Friedrich."

"By constructing spaces, placing slightly discordant objects amongst seemingly natural landscapes, Poynton creates a tension within her work that is intended to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of the act of perception."

"Poynton's paintings are more about the act of looking, of exposing the "trickery" behind traditional artistic practices, than they are windows onto a surreal world."

"Art is always artful, a ruse, a trick. It is a court fool, jumping up and down, aping its masters. Art is part of the dream that we inhabit."

"Art is an offering, a show that mirrors the show we form around ourselves as we move through our scenery."

"In life, as in pictures, there is only the Romantic. Behind the scenes of our lives, there is everything unspoken, unseen, unknown and nothing."

"I would propose that this Synod in this Year of the Family sends a strong message concerning the African Church’s determination to multiply its effort and to use its resources for the building up of sound Christian Family Life, where values of the Gospel are experienced and lived. We must be determined to counter and fight all that would destroy such family life."

"The contemporary Western emphasis on the supreme value of intelligence has tended to suppress certain forms of consciousness and to regard them as irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological and thereby to eliminate them from investigations of the deep past."

"Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependent on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence."

"I believe if we know about one another, and focus more on how we are the same rather than how different, we will be less inclined to prove that we have all the right answers, and get on with the real business of living."

"They were very big locks so you could see the marks on the inside. When you're making it the lock is right there, you keep filing it until it fits in the holes. You hardly have to measure,” he further elaborated."

"Getting out was a bit like making your way through a jungle: if you know the way and all the hazards that lie before you the chances of getting through are good; if you know nothing the tendency is to take chances based on intuition, with unknown results."

"“That's how you beat the fascists: one act of resistance after another,” and “Freedom is very simple idea, which is why, perhaps, it can be so easily lost”."

"A lot of people can't understand how we got the shape of the key, but if you break it down – most of the dimensions you get from the lock itself, you measure the hole,” he explained in relation to his escape."

"I just accepted apartheid because I didn't know any better. I just assumed that's the way things were." — Criminal podcast, Episode 146: Ten Doors, 2020"

"We’re seeing a change in what leadership means. It used to be the person or company with the most money; now it’s about the person with the best ideas. A single person with a great idea and limited resources can create something more powerful than an established company with dozens of employees."

"The end result of our current path is the extinction of Homo sapiens. It is imperative that we cherish and protect wild places and the creatures they harbour. To harm them is to harm ourselves. All of us are sailing through space together on the same fragile, leaky ark. We are dependent on our shipmates for far more than their meat and hides, their horns and scales. Both our continued existence, and the wellbeing of our souls, hinge on the complex matrix of life around us."

"We are part of nature and it is part of us. Everything about our species, from the shape of our teeth to the size of our brains, has been fashioned over millennia by our interaction with the plants and animals around us. What’s more, our sense of beauty and our greatest artistic achievements have been crafted in response to nature. Our yearning for wilderness is a hankering after the place we have come from, and from which we have become alienated in the headlong march of so-called progress."

"My Impossible Five would be: Cape mountain leopard, aardvark, pangolin, riverine rabbit and (naturally occurring) white lion. These animals had survived into our modern age largely due to their elusiveness. Their ‘impossibility’ was their tenuous insurance against extinction. They were still wild and free, most of them living outside national parks, still occupying the same territories they had for millennia. As such, they were symbols of wilderness – that wildness once everywhere, and which is now drastically curtailed and shrinking by the day."

"Jumbled black rocks adorned an otherwise pale, flat landscape of salmons and khakis. Mountains rose in distant ridges. Out there in the Namaqua sea, I found myself thinking of South Africa as an island. Like Robinson Crusoe, I was walking its perimeter, noting the extent of my domain, checking for cannibals, finding fresh water. Sure, there were 47 million others who might make such a claim, but theirs were no more valid than mine, only similar. Beating my drum, singing the land, proclaiming it mine from coast to coast."

"After Gordon’s Bay, I was into veld, snaking towards Koeëlbaai on the R44, the prettiest road in South Africa. The way, now, was open, free of traffic, buildings, humans. My spirits lifted. On the left were towering cliffs, the fynbos was green and I rolled down the window to let in the fragrance. Far below waves crashed against granite boulders, their booming sound reaching me moments after each detonation. I was self-consciously taking it all in, relishing it, this road that would be mine for many weeks to come."