WENDY BOOKATZ’S UPCOMING EXHIBITION : DI ZUN AND KATCHKES (THE SUN AND DUCKS)

DI ZUN AND KATCHKES ( THE SUN AND DUCKS) : AN UPCOMING EXHIBITION BY WENDY LESSICK BOOKATZ AT GALLERY, 7 CLOVELLY ROAD RANDWICK

ARTIST’S STATEMENT : WENDY BOOKATZ

The beings, stories, memories and the before times keep finding their way into my paintings.

Maybe it was 1963. My father Abraham (Abe) Lessick had an enclosure and pond created especially for ducks in our backyard in Johannesburg, now Gauteng, South Africa. At that time I did not understand that his family owned a farmhouse in the Pale of Settlement, (this was the restricted area of the Russian Empire, where Jews were mostly confined by law from 1791- 1917. The area included all of modern day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation), which was sold to help them escape the Pogroms and buy safe passage to South Africa. Perhaps he was trying to recreate something of the “old country”. I remember being mortified that we had ducks and they flew around our fairly conservative neighbourhood. It certainly was not de rigueur, and I’m sure my mother would have very much resisted having ducks.

More than 60 years later those ducks have returned in paint.

There is humour in my work. The ordinary is remembered and mingled with the imagined; the ducks are funny, so too the horses and the fiddle players. Come and see for yourself, see where the ducks take you.

My late friend Linda always brought sunshine into my world. I added horses to Linda’s Portrait. I also added another sunshine friend to this portrait, my wonderful friend Maya, and included myself with pink hair and red lips. It wasn’t only my father who brought the farm into his suburban garden.

Linda always told me about having horses that roamed in their very beautiful, landscaped garden with pool in Linksfield, Johannesburg, now Gauteng, when she was growing up. Her dad Joe loved horses. Not only did he keep horses in their garden, he owned a few blue blood racehorses.

His family escaped Poland in the late 1880’s. Joe’s family originally moved to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and then to South Africa. Was Joe’s love of horses a reflection of his family’s cultural memory, freedom, escape? Did Joe create a home for himself that existed between the ordinary and magical? Chagall painted red horses. I made my horses red, taking my cue from the colour of his horses.”

WHY I USE YIDDISH AS THE TITLE OF THE EXHIBITION

It is the time and place of where the paintings come from.

Di Zun & Katchkes ( The Sun And Ducks)

gives the exhibition a connection to:

My Jewish family history and the world from where my family came from in the Pale of Settlement
My father Abe’s ducks in Johannesburg, connect the old world and his/my new world South Africa/Australia
The Yiddish-speaking Jewish world of the Shtetl, is present in the paintings
The idea of family lore and memory being carried across generations
Di Zun & Katchkes has a particular cultural voice.

The English translation lets everyone understand it, while the Yiddish title makes the viewer encounter the exhibition through a language connected to the history behind it.

“The ducks were always there.”

They were literally in my father’s backyard, speaking Yiddish, of course, but they have acquired another life in my paintings and in the family story. Un Azoy?(And so..)