Bronwyn Law-Viljoen’s discussion of her first novel “The Printmaker”

On Tuesday 1 August 2017, the Department of English, in collaboration with the Department of Library Services, hosted writer Bronwyn Law-Viljoen in the fourth session of the Meet your writer series.

Prof Andries Wessels introduced Bronwyn Law-Viljoen to the audience. She is Associate Professor and Head of Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor and co-founder of Fourthwall Books, and former editor of Art South Africa magazine. She has a PhD in Literature from New York University and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand. She has contributed to and edited many books on art, design and architecture in South Africa and has written essays on South African art and photography for magazines, journals, newspapers and books both locally and internationally. Her short stories have appeared in the journals New Contrast and Aerodrome and her first novel, The Printmaker, was published by Umuzi in 2016. It was received with some acclaim and was shortlisted for the Barry Ronge award – quite an achievement for a first novel

Prof Andries Wessels said he found The Printmaker a beautifully written book, as it deals with the artist, the relationship between life and art, the interpretation of meaning from art, love and friendship and that there were lots of implied parallels between the world of art, printing, printmaking, etching, painting and the literary world.

Prof Bronwyn Law-Viljoen started off by reading from the opening of the novel. The novel begins with the protagonist March who is one of the narrators of the novel, but when the novel begins he is dead. March is based on a real person whom she had never met, but he was a printmaker and lived an obscured life in Johannesburg. After his death he left thousands of prints, etchings and woodcuts and it came about that Bronwyn ended up with almost the entire collection of prints in her house in boxes for 5 years. She said these prints were nudging her in some way, whispering at her and she knew that there was a beautiful story in these prints and this is how the character of March was born.

Secondly Bronwyn mentioned that she was interested in the compulsion of some artists to continually produce art even though these works would never enter the public domain. To her prints are like children, you want them to go out in the world, but even though this artist had the compulsion to produce all these prints, he hid and hoarded them – to her this was a madness. This is how March is born - as an artist who is completely out of place and unable to say anything to his political and social context.

Her third theme was printmaking – the particular way of making art as it is one form of art available across a spectrum and considered the most democratic of the art. Printmaking is a particular way of making art, and is considered the democratic form of art because it does not privilege the single image.

She admitted that she always reads books’ acknowledgements first as she always wants to know whom the writer has thanked and that she also left some clues in hers.