Award-winning artist and farm girl Pauline Gutter attempts to capture the essence of Free State rural life through her large oil paintings and charcoal sketches. Today, still in her twenties, her work has been celebrated both locally and internationally. Mike Burgess travelled to the Brandfort family farm to find out what makes her tick.
Pauline Gutter is predictably busy in her studio when I arrive on the Gutter family farm Nuwe Orde in Brandfort, Free State. She is upbeat, having just arrived back from visiting the four European visual art exhibitions making up the Art Biennale: the 52nd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in Italy, the Art 38 Basel in Switzerland, the Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, and the Skulptur Projekte in Münster.
Her last few sales in SA had paid for the trip, but now she is back at work on the plains of the central Free State, preparing for her next solo exhibition in May 2008. S he says her studio and home on the farm serve as the perfect creative location. “The farm allows me to live in my medium, close to my roots; making it easier to shut off and express myself,” she says. Impressions on a barefoot girl Pauline, the second eldest of five children, grew up watching her father Piet patiently farm with cattle, maize and wheat to support his family.
Her rural experiences as a barefoot child, exposure to her great uncle’s art collection, the tutoring of ballet by her mother, Gerda, and seeing her father’s respected implement designs coming to life, all influenced the development of her appreciation for art. In primary school this appreciation was refined and developed even further by a local German art teacher. Sketching and painting her way through high school she enrolled for a Fine Arts Degree at the University of the Free State in 2000, where she graduated cum laude. By her second year of university she began hosting exhibitions on Nuwe Orde, receiving her first commissioned work. Today, after numerous exhibitions, Pauline can look back at a steady flow of work and recognition. Highlights include being nominated as a finalist for the Absa L`atelier Awards in 2002, winning the Xpozure Awards in 2003, her contributions in 2004 to the Absa Corporate Art Collection Exhibition at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, obtaining second place at the Macufe arts festival in 2006 and her recent participation in the KPSK Group Exhibition in Beveren, Belgium. Furthermore, her work is exhibited in a number of galleries, including the Oliewenhuis Art Museum’s permanent collection, the University of the Free State’s Johannes Stegman Collection and the Absa corporate collection, as well as many more private collections and galleries in SA.
Capturing the rural Free State
“The humbling energy of the rural Free State” is what Pauline tries to capture in her work. Her oil paintings are mostly done on large canvasses where she tries to capture the sense of space one feels in the rural Free State. Special emphasis is given to textured layering in her oils, which helps to emphasise the slow pace of life in the platteland. “Being in the platteland is a lifestyle and not really a way to make money,” Pauline says. “It changes the way you approach life because it is about getting out what you put in over a lifetime.” On the platteland, for example, lives are dedicated mostly to the long-term production of crops and stock, and her paintings often depict these simple economic variables.
Cattle, for example, have become an important theme in her work. Besides the growing number of commissions from cattle farmers wanting Pauline to capture their legendary stud animals on canvas, cattle also serve as a metaphor for human life on the platteland. She explains that cattle grazing the sweeping landscapes of the Free State, despite their adaptability to their surrounds, are brutally vulnerable to larger forces beyond their control – lives cut short by slaughter and disease. In the same way, she says, farmers are vulnerable to serious threats, including increased input costs and crime. It’s the horror and threat of rural violence on an ageing generation that has maybe most deeply influenced much of her best work. “More farmers are killed here than were killed in Zimbabwe. We have become oblivious to rural violence, a sort of denial to be able to make sense of it,” she says.
Pauline has spent hours interviewing victims and has now produced a DVD concerning the growing and disturbing trend.
One of her best works, Afskeid 1, deals brilliantly with issues of rural finality. The large oil painting focuses on the begging gaze of a steer peering through the bars of a truck, hours from certain death. While another is depicted trapped and helpless in a crush. Another work exploring a similar theme Uit Die Blou Van Onse Hemel (qualified for Absa L`atelier Awards) shows two farmers standing without shirts, vulnerable to larger economic, political and social undercurrents. Their chopped off hands emphasise their apparent helplessness.
Face to face with a reality in charcoal
Pauline’s portraits explore the social face of the rural Free State; the various characters like herself who have in the new millennium embraced the distance, space, isolation and threats of life there. Besides such disturbing themes, her work always manages to capture a distinct rural atmosphere that makes you feel different every time you see it. Her landscapes and rural scenes in her charcoal and oil exhibitions Landscapes and Ecstasy 1 and 2, are no exception. But it’s in the platteland where Pauline prefers to be – despite temptations of working overseas. “I don’t think I will be going anywhere soon. I will be here in the Free State continuing to explore my current theme,” she assures. Contact Pauline on 083 662 5060. |fw
