The popular Mondays at Six programme will
be based at Alliance Francaise during the month of October.
The next meeting takes place this coming Monday
(October 1) and is titled Miracle At
Westville Prison.
In
2009 as part of their Prison Project, Life Line invited artist Paulette Barker
to conduct art classes to a group of inmates at the Westville Prison. She chose
two of her favourite Masters to teach her students how to paint: Paul Klee for
his special talent and understanding of colour, colour composition and
sensitivity to music and Vincent Van Goch for his vibrant colours, gestural
brushstrokes and tragic life story.”
Given
a choice of subject matter, looking at Van Goch’s work for inspiration, the
inmates mostly chose his portraits to copy. This choice made sense as it
indicated their desire to draw and paint their own self-portraits. After this
successful exercise, they were ready to paint pictures depicting their own life
stories, prison and childhood memories. These classes stretched over a period
of 18 weeks, comprising 21 two-hour sessions.
All sessions included discussions about
every drawing that was made in class or as homework. The discussions served as
the starting point for each session. This positive criticism became vitally
important for the inmates, to clarify the quality of the work, what could be
improved or left out, etc. It also allowed every student to participate in the
teaching process; an important exploration.
Paulette Barker will show the slides of the
works to illustrate the talk. Assisting her will be Lenny Pillay, who was one
of the inmates attending her classes. He was incarcerated for three-to-six
years and released in March 2009.
Amongst many other achievements since being
discharged, he successfully studied and obtained his Certificate in Islamic Law
via the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he studied eight modules in one
year. He has also been actively involved in delivering talks on Crime Awareness at schools and at UKZN.
More
table bookings phone 031 368 2022.
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