Forty years after he first picked up a brush and was taught work on canvas, political activist and former Robben Island detainee Lionel Davis has opened his first retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery.
“I started drawing as a child because we lived in very crowded conditions in District Six.
“We only had a little room; initially it was four people in the room, my mother and two sisters,” says Davis.
His exhibition, Gathering Strands, celebrates four decades of his activism and creative production, and its opening today coincides with his 81st birthday.
Davis grew up in Canterbury Street, and says he ventured onto the streets for his first forays into art drawings.
“There was no space to do anything, except to eat and to sleep.
“So the street was our playground, and I developed a love for drawing at a very early age.
“The street was my canvas, the pavement was my canvas, the walls were my canvas and I would even draw in my school books,” says Davis.
Those initial steps was mostly copying comic book art, and trying to re-create scenes from the movies he had seen at the “bioscope”.
He would continue with his drawings until he left Harold Cressy High School, where he had attended for one year.
“Post my schooling I stopped drawing but it lay dormant for many years,” says Davis.
He would subsequently be arrested in 1964 for his political activism and acts of sabotage against the apartheid state and was sentenced to seven years on Robben Island. It was also there that he completed his Senior Certificate.
Upon his release in 1971 he was placed under house arrest for five years.
His family had been moved to Manenberg after their house had burnt down in 1969 while he had been imprisoned alongside the likes of Neville Alexander and Fikile Bam.
“Post my house arrest in 1976 I was totally traumatised; I needed healing, I needed help. Fortunately, at the end of 1977 my banning order had been lifted and I could travel more freely, and I came across the Community Arts Project (CAP) just by sheer chance, opposite the Mowbray police station,” says Davis.
Seeing the building piqued his curiosity, and one day, he says, he followed “a young lady”. He adds a disclaimer saying “I’m not used to following young ladies”.
She would walk into the CAP building and he says the building was being renovated, he was unemployed at the time and just “got involved”.
“At the beginning of 1978 they had their first intake of art students and I was among the very first to enrol I was already 41 then.
“For the first time I was learning about mixing colours, about perspective,” says Davis.
In 1982, after returning from the Arts and Culture Conference against Apartheid in Botswana, he was one of the activists who opened up a screenprinting project.
Mario Pissarra, who was instrumental in getting the exhibition off the ground, says he first met Davis in the late 1980s.
“I started doing some work on Lionel in 1999-2000.
“I wrote an article on him which was published by the Africa Centre in London on their website.
“It was more of a biographical account but it ended with a sentence that ‘a retrospective exhibition was overdue’,” said Pissarra.