SA artist finds Zürich market challenges, suits her fine
The Sentinel
What does a creative do when she finds herself uprooted; lock, stock and barrel? Certainly not sit idle at home, twiddling her thumbs.
When her husband took a job at the University of Zurich, South African artist Claire Linder tagged along but clearly with no intention to be her partner’s cheerleader.
She had her own career – already carved, to fine-tune in foreign lands.
A University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg campus) BA graduate, Linder reflects on her option upon graduation: “I studied French and some fine arts subjects, that is, a rather mixed bag, so when the time came to find a job, I was ill qualified for anything really.
“I spent a couple of years doing office work and translation for a French company and, in my spare time, I taught myself how to do botanical illustration which seemed to fit my penchant for detailed work. Two years later, I headed off on the obligatory tour of Europe, stopping in London to get some advice and experience at the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew (London).”
“I continued with the illustration on my return to South Africa and finally got the job of the illustrator at the Pretoria Botanic Gardens, where I stayed for two years before heading back to Kew with my husband-to-be, a botanist working for the same institution.
“The work at Pretoria Herbarium was chiefly for the various in-house journals or as descriptive, line drawings to aid identification of plants. The following three glorious years at Kew really taught me a lot. I worked on an orchid book with two Kew botanists, as well as doing illustration for South African and British academic journals. Never anything to do with the industry. Then we travelled home overland from London to Cape Town, during which I did a few works. It was difficult however as we were constantly on the move.
“Home again, my husband settled down to teach at the University of Cape Town and we, in due course, had two children. After some time and a sabbatical for a year in Australia, the children were a bit older and I resumed more regular work hours. I exhibited, did private commissions and together with three others formed the Botanical Artists Society of South Africa, which is going strong to this day.”
It is surprising that being this itinerant, she began with no idea of where she wanted to go or, based on her mixed bag of tertiary subjects, what she planned to do career-wise.
“Certainly, I had no idea as a young student where my life was heading. I had to work hard, had many trials and errors, to find out where I was going.”
Her website shows her oeuvre inclusive of paintings, photos and textile works and “as indicated, no murals painted at any botanical institute”.
The only time Linder dabbled with ceramics was with the designs for the Veld Collection of mugs showing one plant from each of the biomes in South Africa, she says.
“Obviously, as you may know, the more you do, the more your work is recognised. I was on a good wicket with a lot of work until the late 1990s, when my husband was asked to apply for a job at Uni Zürich. So better than a midlife crisis we decided to move. A move that I have never regretted. Through family and marriage, we both had Swiss passports.”
It would seem that the move abroad was just the tonic her career needed as she is more visible now. The work she posts on social media – Facebook, in this reporter’s experience – is, what’s the word, beautiful.
“When the dust settled in Switzerland, I started painting again. However, my boredom with the constraints of illustration were becoming increasingly apparent and in addition, I had lost my ‘known’ public and market. It was a good time to change to something more challenging, something requiring more ingenuity, creativity and thought. It was another long autodidactic haul, with the odd class here and there, but nothing formal.
“In Switzerland I am not even a fish but a fragment of a tadpole. The competition is fierce, but in my old age (born in 1954), I find much contentment in the creative process, exhibit where I can and take pleasure in the little that is sold.”
She responds thus to a question posed about one particular Facebook post: “The ‘three gone one left’ referred to the rather abstracted photo that I had used in that work. (It was a) photo of my father, mother, brother-in-law and nephew. The first three have died, the nephew is still alive.”
Linder’s advice to the young wannabe eager to follow in her footsteps is this: “There is no money in this profession. All the artists I know personally have other jobs to finance their passion. But having said that, I only regret that I did not start freer work sooner. There is nothing quite like tapping into the latent deep well of creativity and exercising it as you would a muscle. It is demanding, passionate, critical, beguiling, frustrating and just magic.”
These adjectives result in breath-taking works that have people in awe. Someone says to a painting: “Interesting colors (sic) and composition, but there is a bit of a ‘dark’ feeling about it … and that may be the intention. Everything does not need to be happy.”
To which the artist responds: “No dark feelings intended. Interpretation is so subjective.”
She is therefore not able to dictate what the buyer of her art should take away from her pieces.
But the rest of us are content to just be enthralled by the beauty of her works.
Modest to a fault, she is averse to being described as ‘award-winning’ though she has bagged one or two gongs.
Hoping she won’t take umbrage, we state hastily that she is nonetheless widely published.
This article was first used in The Sentinel.