Description

Phantom Night exhibits the technical process of washes and colour coding in my practice. The colour swatch ‘Phantom Night’ directs the painting of a ghostly photograph taken in Rhodes Park, Kensington. Hinting at the presence of Carl Jung’s ‘shadow’ archetype, the painting also brings to the fore the age- old anxiety around night-time in South Africa. As the golden hour, a popular temporal setting for the pastoral, transitions to twilight, the racialised ‘other’ becomes an immediate threat. On the dark side of a ravine in Thomas Pringle’s (1839) colonial sonnet Caffire, he is found “eyeing the farmer’s lowing herds afar,/ Impatient watching till the Evening Star / Lead forth the Twighlight dim, that he may glide Like panther to the prey…”