The second in a series on contemporary artists who may be of interest to cartoonists and comics makers.
In this installment, I’ll explore the diverse work of William Kentridge (b. 1955), a South African artist who works in animation, drawing, film and performance. In recent years, he has also created large-scale installation work as well as designs for opera and theatre.
(Untitled) Drawing for “Other Faces”, 2011
William grew up under apartheid and his parents were lawyers working to defend victims of the oppressive system. As such, his early work dealt heavily with themes related to South African apartheid and its effects on society. His dense, bold charcoal lines and focus on socio-political topics brings to mind the work of Käthe Kollwitz and the Mexican revolutionary printmakers.
His work developed through the 80s and by the early 90s, he was creating animated films. These works employ a unique technique in which a single charcoal drawing is repeatedly erased and redrawn to create the successive frames of animation. The film becomes a record of the sequential drawing process, even as the drawing surface itself becomes scarred with the artist’s mark-making and rough charcoal implements.
These films often focus on two characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, portraying them as part of an ongoing and fragmented narrative set in a dystopian and bureaucratic landscape.
From “Five Themes”, MoMA Retrospective, 2010
In other works, Kentridge employs sequential art to make connections and juxtapositions of imagery to further explore his political and social subjects. Objects and figures interact and transform, often on top of found surfaces and literature that deal with the history and culture of South Africa, both before and after Democracy.
His work is also laced with a dose of theatricality and surrealism, in which time and memory fade and intertwine. It lends his work an unsettling, dreamlike quality which offers many lessons on mood and atmosphere.
Drawings for “Tango for Page Turning”, 2013 (detail)
These works in particular draw the line directly through sequential narrative, with drawings situated on pages of literature that advance and interact with the printed text as you turn pages. Here we find a ready connection with the comics medium, though employed in a more abstracted way. These works feel archaic and nostalgic, recalling the objective depiction of motion from Edward Muybridge’s photo experiments. It centers Kentridge firmly in the realm of sequential art, with a tangible focus on the interactivity of the reader, not just creating animated frames.
Drawing from Stereoscope, 1998-99
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