PROFIT AND DISCOUNT

I have a notebook in which I record the images that capture my imagination when I am going about my daily life. Often they are fleeting glances into other peoples’ worlds , a man sitting under a tree, a woman carrying a bundle of sticks. Often they are vignettes past by in a flurry as I drive through traffic to the studio. I was in Johannesburg in November 2014, working with Joe Legate at LL Editions on my first set of three lithographs :

the “Journeys of discoverie.” Series.

On my way to and from Newtown I saw the people who collect and sort the detritus left by city life. I found those anonymous figures sometimes distorted by the baggage they were carrying, pushing in carts, intriguing. I made drawings of them from memory every evening after work.

On the five hour drive home to Botswana, I stopped in Swartruggens for a break and found a strange little book in a junk shop. It was called “Profit and Discount” and consisted of pages of percentages in columns, tables of discounts on net profits, a 1950s shopkeepers aid. I bought the book for R5.00.

When I got home I transferred all the drawings I had made of the Newtown street people and more, onto the pages of this book.

In November 2015 I returned to LL Editions and made a limited edition book out of the original sketchbook “Profit and Discount”.

It is a tribute to those men on the streets, erstwhile beggars who now trade in other peoples rubbish, keeping the roads clean and earning a sort of discount from other peoples profits.