A tall woman with greying hair, gentle eyes and a comfortable dress, I approached Annelie Venter at the walkabout to her exhibition at the Bellville Arts Association gallery. Annelie’s exhibition “Pause” contains almost 100 small works in oil and acrylic. After years of painting mostly nature scenes, this solo is the first more clearly autobiographical.
As the title suggests, the exhibition is about being suspended, she says, about waiting. But it is also about being embodied, about incarnation.
“Pause” documents the five years in which her husband suffered from kidney failure and had to receive a treatment called dialysis. Dialysis entails attaching a machine to the patient’s body to filter and purify the blood when the kidneys can no longer do so. Administering this treatment, she explains, required them to ‘pause’ next to the machine for half an hour, four times a day, for the last five years. During this time she rarely touched her brushes. Life was too interrupted. A kidney transplant eventually became an option to them, but only after the delay caused by COVID-19 ended. The artist was the donor, and her husband the receiver (her two portrais inspired by this was included in the R&V Top 40). The transplant was successful, and Annelie started painting again.
First, she decided to paint a daily carnation from her flower garden, a simple exercise in observation. She reflected later that the Afrikaans word for the flower, ‘angelier’, has the same semantic roots as the word ‘anchor’. Planting and cultivating hundreds of these flowers in their farm garden was a therapeutic act during their waiting, working and praying. An anchor. Waiting, she recalls, was the hardest, and most mundane, part of their five year ordeal. Not only did they pause four times a day for the treatment, her life was strung-out as she waited in doctors’ rooms, awaited medical test results, and waited next to her husband’s hospital bed as he recovered from infection.
The English name, carnation, she explains, reminds of ‘incarnation’, that which has to do with the bodily and fleshly. In stark contrast with the flowers are her images of hospital beds, dialysis drips, and blood-red organs as they are precariously manipulated by sterile medical tools. I have never seen medical scenes more beautifully painted. A body in a hospital bed is a confrontational image, one that lingers. Yet the artist renders it with the same aesthetic sensibility than her carnations. Here is a ‘broken beauty’, as E John Walford, and others, have described it – a Christian brokenness, a paradox. It wrenches the viewer, for how can suffering be beautiful?
The answer lies in the upside-down theology of Christianity, one in which the ultimate beauty lies in the ugliness of the crucifixion and the ultimate hope in “the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”, as the apostle’s creed explains. In Annelie’s paintings the ‘body’ is given a central place. God’s body was broken so our bodies can be healed. How does the artist draw our attention to the paradox of a broken beauty?
For one, the faces around the theatre bed have a gleam in their eyes, perhaps caught in a moment of medical banter that surgeons and nurses so often share around the life-and-death ritual that is the operation table. In her paintings the theatre room becomes more than a place haunted by medical trauma; it becomes a place of warmth and restoration. She paints a number of portraits, portraying the nurse as smiling, the kidney specialist as thoughtful. Amid a crisis, which could have turned her in on herself, the artist not only notices, but really sees, those around her. These are the people dedicated to restoring, within their capabilities, the corruption of the body.
Flowers are often given to those in hospital. Subconsiously we feel that physical brokenness requires a physical response. Both flowers and bodies slow us down to occupy their time and space. The moment of medical crisis, initially, is much more acute than the slow unfolding of the carnation seeds into flowers. But then the artist learns that there is slowness to trauma, a waiting, just as there is to gardening. She sees both the gift and the curse in the ‘pause’. The gift of the first yellow carnation to bloom in her garden. The waiting and lamenting for the brokenness of the body. There is something biblical in the metaphor of the seed and the body. The waiting of the seed promises the hopeful fulfilment of the fruit. The diseased, corrupted kidney is restored to a healthy, functioning organ, a first fruit of the ultimate restoration (or so we believe) of our bodies into perfect, uncorrupted things.
As E John Walford writes “All forms of beauty touch our desire for wholeness, yet a broken beauty offers something different. A broken beauty is not only true to the human condition, but it can embody the essence of the gospel of redemption, or, at very least, manifest its fruits… A broken beauty can be a redemptive beauty, which acknowledges suffering while preserving hope”.*
The artist holds beauty and brokenness together, fragility and wonder side by side. Her gratitude reaches beyond a successful transplant and roots itself in a deeper understanding of the meaning of life. Whereas for a cynical artist all of life becomes tainted by the meaninglessness of existence, the Christian artist imbues everything with meaning; the dog in the back garden, the view of the street from the hospital window, a picture taken upon coming home after the operation. Of course, we lament. But the mundaneness of suffering becomes the persistence of hope. That is the profound mystery of our earth-bound existence. Inspired by the broken beauty of God, we cling to the hope that we will not be broken forever.
*E John Walford (2007). “The case for a Broken Beauty” in The Beauty of God, edited by Treier, Husbands and Lundin. IVP academic.
More images of the exhibition can be seen at https://www.artb.co.za/product-category/annelie-venter-pause-2023/
Donor Kidney, Annelie Venter, Oil on Dialysis box cardboard, 36cm (H) X 26cm (W)
Hospital shower, Annelie Venter, Acrylic on Dialysis box cardboard, 26cm (H) X 17cm (W)
PD
Annelie Venter,
Acrylic on Dialysis box cardboard,
33cm (H) X 26cm (W)
Study for ‘The Recipient’
Annelie Venter,
Oil on Dialysis box cardboard,
48cm (H) X 55cm (W),
Unframed
The Good Doctor
Annelie Venter,
Oil on Dialysis box cardboard,
24cm (H) X 30cm (W),
Unframed
Transplant in Progress
Annelie Venter,
Oil on canvas,
91cm (H) X 91cm (W),
Unframed
Anchor
Annelie Venter,
Oil on canvas,
20cm (H) X 20cm (W),
Unframed
The Gardener
Annelie Venter,
Oil on canvas,
30cm (H) X 40cm (W),
Unframed