Clifford Mpai
Clifford Mpai was the Oppenheimer family’s gardener at Little Brenthurst in Johannesburg. His talent and his industriousness as a draughtsman resulted in densely-worked pencil and crayon drawings of garden landscapes and suburban environments. These have a unique charm. Spatial ambiguities, with a tendency to flatten forms and arrange them parallel to the picture-plane, are a central feature of his work. Mpai’s work has enjoyed wide recognition not only through its inclusion on some important exhibitions, but also in the fact that he is today represented in South Africa’s major public collections. Woman cooking (plate 43) in the Campbell Smith Collection is atypical of Mpai’s usual subject matter, and a somewhat idiosyncratic inclusion. Human figures are seldom evident in Mpai’s oeuvre. This representation of what appears to be a white woman presiding over a huge two-legged potpie set over a log fire in an interior space is unusual indeed. Read More…
