AfrikaBurn, Africa Plays

For those not familiar with the "AfrikaBurn" festival, it's a gathering of people in the dry N Cape Karoo, bringing with them all manner of inspired or crazy ventures into creativity. Based on the "Burning Man" festivals in the States, the creations are actually burned at the end, thus the name.

The conceptual framework of the festival is rather interesting and you can find out more here, but what drew my attention was a series of pics taken by a photographer friend on mine at the 2009 event - Monica Miguel Vaccaro. She documented the entire event using a rather specialised fish-eye lens, warping space, curving horizons and giving the sense that, yes, we actually live on a round ball.

I relate strongly to Monica's sense of composition and her eye for interesting elements, so some of the images were saying loud and clear, "paint me", which with her permission I began to do earlier this year. The first of these began with this image.

It's taken through one of the circles in the dome above, and the line in the sand is actually an enormous pictogram a la the Nasca lines in Peru, visible only from the air. In this case the lines were laid out with the use of GPS, but unfortunately no helicopter was on hand to get the full effect. Nice concept though. The bicycle is there because cars are banned and cycling is the best way to get around.

 As is usual with my approach I messed about with the image in Photoshop, and in this case took that a stage further by printing out the result and doodling over it with a ballpoint pen. For no reason other than that I could, I enlarged the rear wheel of the bike and added a flag. The lines in the sky followed an idea of drawing a pictogram there.

In practice though the bike had to be reduced on the canvas, the lines became a crisscross dividing the painting into segments rather as if reality itself were cracking, and the curve of the horizon changed. How that last happened I really don't recall, but I much prefer the final version.

This piece is something of a stylistic departure from earlier work, in particular because I was experimenting in the final painting with the  doodles and cross-hatching of the conceptual sketch. I found that the paintbrush isn't that comfortable with the approach so the result was quite messy, but somehow it works.

At 180x110cm it's a big canvas, but as of this writing I'm contemplating doing a short run of prints which will be smaller due to the limits of printable canvas size.