Fanie Buys
Fanie says:
some very funny, disarmingly frank and dryly effacing things.
Fanie observes:
- on a lot if his work being “instinctive – paint now, ask questions later.”
- how his use of colour is “more dumb luck than creative genius.”
- that “painting another person is very intimate, I want to respect that proximity.”
- on a T-shirt he printed that “I’m in control of my life in that I’m the architect of my own pitiful demise.”
- a ‘Diana…Princess of Hearts’ poster (it hangs above his bed).
- his embrace of the paradoxical and eclectic, the “gross and beautiful… big and disgusting… I often veer across the four-lane highway of aesthetics.”
- that he has, in the past, “picked up my brushes to serve my strongest natural instinct: passive aggression.”
Fanie has:
- a bit of a love affair with painting pop culture icons, like Princess Diana, Nicole Kidman, Eartha Kitt and Diana Ross.
- a BA degree (with distinction) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
- received the Judy Steinberg Award for Painting and the Simon Gerson Award for an Original Body of Work.
- had two solo exhibitions and exhibited in several group shows around South Africa.
- expressed “a hope that, one day, at my retrospective, all my painting together will make people feel like that moment before a panic attack – when one feels like a ghost haunting their own body.”