ART
Drawn from the drive-in
Marlene Dumas’s inspiration came from movies and Miss Worlds
Marlene Dumas, one of South Africa’s best-known artists, especially for her portraiture, learnt the rules of imagery from watching films at the drive-in. The light of the moon and stars projected onto the images of film stars on screen was magical and mysterious to a young Stellenbosch schoolgirl and sparked her interest in the gaze that looked as if it meant “just for you”.
Dumas, 71, grew up in an Afrikaans family on a wine farm and attended Bloemhof Girls’ School in Stellenbosch. Her father died when she was 12 and her mother, a broad-minded woman with an interest in the arts, encouraged her daughter to express her aptitude for drawing...
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