WORDS Amelia Brown PHOTOS Henrique Wilding
Artist Michael Chandler recently completed a magnificent tiled mural for a vegetable garden in Noordhoek, Cape Town.
Michael’s love affair with blue-and-white ceramics began during boyhood. He grew up on the Wild Coast and used to collect little fragments of porcelain that had washed up from shipwrecks. He still has them and claims them among his most precious treasures. These enchanting finds, along with a keen early interest in drawing, nature and reading, and a vivid imagination, have all no doubt contributed to Michael’s artistic vocation. As well as illustrating, Michael owns and runs Chandler House, a small gallery, shop and studio in Cape Town.
Planning a 9 m-wide artwork that comprises nine panels and more than 1 850 tiles is as much a mathematical feat as it is creative one. It required lots of measuring, drawing and measuring again, and the help of some of Michael’s architect friends who have access to software.
“A huge amount of development and thought are required before picking up a brush on a project of this scale,” says Michael, who both sketched and painted free-handed. “I spent many hours ensuring that the lattice pattern was balanced, that it tied in with all the other diagonal lines, and that the final result was harmonious to the eye… Which was all nothing compared to trying to install it!”
That took 10 days in the Cape Town winter rain under a hired marquee and was enormously stressful.” While Michael deliberately tried not to count the time it took him to paint this project, fearing the sheer scale would have been demoralising, he warrants it took him six months, in-between his day job and other commissions, to complete.
As for his inspiration for the botanicals, Michael buys books obsessively and gets a huge amount of inspiration from nature, too. “I hike a lot,” he says, “and am always bending over to take close-ups of plants that I think could be used in future work.”
Visit chandlerhouse.co.za to see more of Michael’s work.
