Art & about Cape Town

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears,” Gertrude Stein, writer and patron to Picasso once said. The Tjorts!/Cheers! exhibition explores this idea. In the show lines of text and lines from works of art form a dialogue where the words and art come together to create a more complex, rich vision. Collaboration between poets and artists is not a novel idea. There is even a word for it: “ekphrasis” defined as “the response of one art form to another” and it often involves poetry responding to a medium of art. It goes both ways though – with the artist’s work as a starting point for the poet, and the poetry as a stimulus for the artist. And sometimes it is a complete organic collaboration. Inspired by South African writer Danie Marais’ poem of the same name the exhibition is essentially a creative conversation between the poet and visual artists, Tina Jensen, Marlise Keith and John Murray as well as Marna Hattingh and Liza Grobler who co-curated the sho