I want to share an interesting little story of my life. For the past few weeks I have been working on a mural project for a city in Germany called Dormagen. The project alone was an exciting challenge but the most interesting bit is how I landed the project.
11 years ago I worked on a similar project but on a much smaller scale. I was still living in Johannesburg, South Africa with my parents. It was a normal day, in my room, which was outside of the main house; I was working on a painting in the company of my friends when all of a suden a woman that I knew walked up my doorstep with a strange man behind her. As I approached the door the woman just pointed her finger at me and said that's him, he is the "artist". I sighed with relief but still feeling a bit anxious wondering what this was all about. Apparently the guy was working on a project that involved painting walls locally as promotion for a government initiative, honestly I forgot what it was called but they were looking for local artists, hence the lady leading them to me. Right then and there the man said to me are you an artist? We have a job for you, let's go! I stammered a bit, overwhelmed by the proposal which seemed to offer me no option to decline, so I went along with it. Inside my heart was beating really hard because I knew that I had never painted on a wall before, what if I mess it up? I asked myself. One thing I knew for sure was that I was not gonna show how Intimidated I was, It felt like I had to prove that I was a real artist, ready, anytime and always!
I drove with the man to the site where the work was taking place and there I met the manager of the project and he briefed me quickly on what the project was about and what they required from me. The work itself was not complicated, it mainly entailed painting logos in big scale with lettering, basically it was a signwriting job but nonetheless I was inexperienced and very overwhelmed. I was used to painting on a canvas in the comfort of my studio/ bedroom.To cut a long story short I called a fellow artist friend to work with me since two local artist were required for the job. We were also asked to work at another location which was not part of our district since they were unable to find artist local to that area. We were paid in cash for the work we did in our neiborhood and we were supposed to receive money for the extra job via bank transfer. Needless to say this money was never transferred we were cheated of half of our pay, not that it was much anyway, but it was ours and we earned it. We were young and inexperienced, where I come from this sort of thing happened quite often.
Now 11 years later after all has been forgotten, my wife comes back home from a meeting with an artist woman who had worked on various mural projects in South Africa as part of her social development work. During the meeting as she was showing my wife her portfolio, my wife(Mira) just randomly mentioned the fact that I once did similar work when I was younger. This caught the woman(Uta)'s attention because she had recently been offered to take part in mural project where she would colaborate with a foreign artist, but she was not keen because she would have to organise visas, travels and that was too much since her hands were already full with other projects. Hearing that I had experience painting murals sounded interesting to her so she asked me to contact her and maybe have a meeting, if ever I was interested. I for one was not sure if I should do this because I have not been painting for years, did not have a portfolio to show my experience, so I was not sure if this is even an option. I talked about it with Mira and I decided to give it a try but I had no expectations, as far as I was concerned this would be a fun, bonus project that would reconnect me with an old part of myself. The reason why this was a bonus to me was the fact that I had left my job because of our plans to move back to Cape Town South Africa so the project would begin at a time when I would have free time on my hands so it seemed to be ideal and the money was also good. I decided to call my mom back in South Africa to find out if they still had some of my old artwork and I remembered that I had made paintings for my uncle's company workspace so I asked if they could take some pictures of those paintings. Within a week's time I got all the pictures of my old work, some of it was from my college days.
A walk with me through memory lane..
This is what I used as my portfolio and I also explained to Uta my situation and it was all good. On the day of our meeting we hit it off, she liked what I had to show and the next move was to present ourselves to the board in the city of Dormagen.
To be continued..
