AGAC 2024 Top 25 Finalist - Brenda Fantozzi - The African Scream

I was born in Johannesburg and lived most of my life in the big cities working for large corporate firms – the corporate life and hectic rat race eventually took its toll, and I decided to give it up and chose to live a slower-paced life. My husband and I, together with our family of cats, moved to the sleepy village of Wilderness on the Garden Route, where I converted a room in our home into a pottery studio and developed what was initially a part-time hobby into a more-than-just-part-time daily activity.

Although I was never formally schooled in any art form I soon learned that there is nothing quite like the experience of working with clay, it offers unlimited opportunities for creativity and new directions. I love the fact that when working with clay, I can interact directly with the material. While I enjoy creating sculptures, some practical and others rather whimsical, my passion is to make wall-art using individually made ‘tiles’.

Art is, on its most basic level, a form of communication with many layers to a piece of work. It may be amusement, a thoughtful moment or a theme that resonates or it could just be a shape, surface or line that attracts the eye. I believe one cannot create a work of art without a piece of themselves being expressed in that creation.

Since childhood, I have always been intrigued by the possibilities of what could have provoked the person to scream in the original Edvard Munch work. My father had a religious book in his study which featured the painting on the cover. I have a vague recollection that the book was a discussion on the anxiety of the human condition, but in my innocence I always believed there was a much more obvious explanation to the scream. This art challenge has given me the opportunity to go back to my childhood and revisit those daydreams.

To me, the colors in the sky strongly resemble an African sky.

Why did I choose a leopard and not a lion in my version of this piece?– unlike lions, leopards are typically loners making encounters feel more intimate and yet threatening at the same time – I am sure that the close proximity to such a majestic creature would evoke a scream encompassing both extreme fear and intense awe.

In the words of Edvard Munch himself “an infinite scream passing through nature”.