"The paintings create themselves. It's very exciting because you don't know the end result. It's also very liberating."
Helen Joseph grew up on a farm in the Free State, moving to Johannesburg when she was eight years old. An eternal eccentric, her life path has been unconventional, and she not only paints, but creates in any medium she can lay her hands on.
Joseph is renowned for her bold, black-and-white charcoal drawings of nude women. The drawings have always been more remarkable for their texture and painterliness than for the depiction of women as perfectly drawn, sensuous bodies devoid of emotion. No context is provided for these bodies, neither is there a need for narrative, as the drawings-cum-paintings are concerned with line and texture. Joseph's work makes no attempt to hide the process of their creation. Instead, they take the viewer along on the journey. The artist works with a delicate and detailed drawing as a base, which is then reworked through different mediums. Most of the initial drawing, though not all, becomes lost in this process of adding veils of colour. The black-and-white drawing is still there, diffuse, yet strong, still holding everything up, but with the addition of colour, the drawing becomes something else entirely. Duality and complexity lies at the heart of Joseph's work; not only is there more than one way to look at something, but there are many more questions than answers. Querying and exploring is much more dynamic than to solving and defining.
