William Kentridge: That Which I Have Drawn

To begin

In preparation for these lectures, I made a list of projects, drawings, films, installations and performances I could use as the spine of these talks—each lecture having a project, to be used both as a reference to what I was talking about, and also as raw material with which to think. Thinking in cardboard, or breath, or ink, or charcoal, or gesture. I wrote down all the projects I’ve done over the last ten years.

But then the list expanded from a list of specific films and installations and theatre productions to a larger list of all the things I had drawn in my forty-seven years in the studio.

I have drawn:

AN ACACIA TREE,
A PAPINO,
TWO LOVERS,
A PINSTRIPED SUIT,
A MAN IN A PINSTRIPED SUIT,
A COFFEE-POT,
ANOTHER COFFEE-POT,
THIRTY-EIGHT RHINOCERI.

A list many pages long.

A self-portrait in the third person

One can make a self-portrait out of these objects, these drawings, everything that emerges in pencil or charcoal; or rather one can’t escape these being a self-portrait of the longue durée, in the way the books you have read also become one’s biography; the shelves with particular, familiar volumes being another kind of likeness. One is aware of the shelves filled with the books one has read, the books one always means to read, and the ever-larger collection of books one knows one will never read, but one still wants on the shelves. There is the visual memory of the shelves of books, but also an intimation of the weight, the heft of all the words in them.

I am skeptical of Kindle-reading, or reading on screens, and writing, too. The changeability of the screens makes me mistrust them. I mistrust the slipperiness of the screen, because the slipperiness of a screen becomes a slippage of memory. Marginal notes don’t find a purchase, the way they do in a book. A phrase a third of the way down the left-hand page, three-fifths of the way through the book—these disappear on the screen. I also mistrust what I write on a screen. I write these notes with a fountain pen. It is more difficult to escape your own stupidity or confront it. (Much of this series of lectures will be trying to find a defense of this evident stupidity.)

If one can make a biography out of what one has drawn, one can also make a negative biography, a description of the self by everything that is outside it, by that which has not been drawn.

More about the fountain pen: it pushes thinking farther up the arm, not just your knuckles working on a keyboard; at least an elbow, a change of pressure that comes from the shoulder.

The possibility of uncertain thought, where the speed of the pen outruns the fine control in the effort to write as fast as one thinks, and one gains a productive illegibility. Did I write, SIGHS OF REPENTANCE or SIGNS OF REPENTANCE? MAYHEM AND SLAUGHTER may also be MAYHEM AND LAUGHTER.

But if one can make a biography out of what one has drawn, one can also make a negative biography, a description of the self by everything that is outside it, by that which has not been drawn.

That which I have drawn:

AN ANGEL WRITING,
A CROWD IN A LANDSCAPE,
A COW IN THE WAVES,
A TAPE RECORDER,
THE UNION BUILDINGS IN PRETORIA,
ANOTHER RHINOCEROS,
A CHAISE LONGUE,
A SIDE OF BEEF,
MARCUS AURELIUS AND A GARIBALDI,
THE FALLS OF AN AFRICAN RIVER.

That which I have not drawn:

THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND,
A PHOTOSTAT MACHINE,
A BEEF WELLINGTON,
DON BRADMAN,
A FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST,
A SPANISH GALLEON,
A WEIMARANER,
AN ELECTRIC TOASTER,
THE MOONS OF SATURN.

I’ve never drawn a hippopotamus—in fact I realize I have.

I’ve never drawn sunrise over Cairo.

But I have drawn:

AN IRIS,
A MAN ON A BICYCLE,
A TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, A BOWL OF PEONIES,
A MINE HEADGEAR,
A ROMAN QUINQUEREME, A TOAST RACK,
A WILDEBEEST, AN AMPERSAND,
THE WORLD ON ITS HIND LEGS, MY WIFE IN THE BATH,
GOETHE IN ITALY.

I have not drawn:

WAGNER…IN FACT, I HAVE DRAWN WAGNER,
A COACH-AND-FOUR,
THE YORKSHIRE MOORS,
EMMA,
LADY HAMILTON,
YORKSHIRE PUDDING AND ROAST BEEF,
THE JOHANNESBURG CITY HALL,
KENNETH KAUNDA,
A RHODODENDRON,
A MASS SPECTROMETER,
A GRAPEFRUIT.

What is of us, and what is not? Where to find our edge? This is another theme of these talks: What is me and what is the world beyond me? And particularly, what are the negotiations that happen at this border, the meeting point where the world comes towards us, and we go out to meet it?

In this regard, we can think of a drawing as a membrane, a vibrating tympanum. On one side, the world comes onto the membrane. I draw a tree. The world comes towards us with this tree. And at the same time, we project onto it not just all the trees inside us, but all the associations that the image of a tree throws up: memories of specific trees, the mulberry tree in my childhood garden, the two white stinkwoods planted in expectation of the hammock that would one day hang between them. And other less immediate associations: shade, fallen leaves, strange fruit hanging, three trees on a hilltop.

The shade of a family tree
Let us look at a tree: an oak, say (though I have not drawn an oak tree, I have drawn many oak leaves)—a very English tree for someone coming from Johannesburg, where our indigenous trees are generally short and spiky. The green of a great oak tree. These trees are enticing, unbelievably enticing, the green of deciduous trees, of European deciduous trees.

I realize that since this lecture was written I have drawn oak trees. The Quercus alba that is the tree of Orpheus (this for a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo), but also English oak trees in Johannesburg—all of which are dying because of an infestation of shot-borer beetle. One by one the great trees are killed, the suburban greenness collapsing.

When I was seven or eight, we went on a family picnic for my sister’s birthday to a pleasure resort outside Johannesburg, Henley-on-Klip—a rare short stretch of river with willow trees, reeds, the rowing boat, an afternoon messing about in a boat. There were boiled eggs. There was salt in twists of wax paper. My father’s sleeves rolled up at the oars of the rowing boat. My mother spitting cherry pips with me and my sister.

The deep reverberating pleasure (a memory sixty years old) was not just the water, the dappled light, the cosy domesticity of the family, of the rowing boat, but also a sense of rightness. This was how it was meant to be.

My grandfather on my mother’s side had given me a book (Great Landscapes) in which there was an image of a painting by John Constable. Huge shady trees, a river, dappled light. This is where we were, in this painting of Constable, in this English idyll of rivers, trees, shade; in “this other Eden”; “this sceptred isle,” “this green and pleasant land.” (The chronology is out; the book came after the picnic, but the later book also constructs the memory of the earlier event.)

How did we get there?

Goose
My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a chazzan in the synagogue (and I presume his father, too). His name was Woolf Kantorovich. He came from Lithuania to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time of the South African War, fought by the English to gain control of the immensely rich gold fields of Johannesburg. Most Jews in South Africa came from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—escaping pogroms and the restrictions on their lives imposed by Czarist Russia, and attracted to South Africa by reports of newfound wealth. They also hoped to find a place where Jews would not be the lowest rung of the social ladder.

In 1908, his son—my grandfather, my father’s father—went into politics. And so, to help him, the Reverend Kantorovich from Lithuania changed his name to this very English-sounding “Kentridge.” It wasn’t that Judaism or Jewishness was expunged. I had a secular Jewish childhood—holidays celebrated, a Bris, a Bar Mitzvah. But it was that I was bifurcated: the Jewishness circling the Englishness, or the Englishness circling the Jewishness.

Some years ago, I read a report of an Elizabethan English cookbook in which it spoke of the melancholy nature of the Jews. This melancholy, the book said, was explained by the Jews’ “over- fondness for goose.” And I thought, yes, that’s me…well, duck; there were no geese to be found in South African restaurants.

But a duck is almost a goose. Yes, I always order duck when I’m in a restaurant. I can go with this description. Now I know why I love goose. But not necessarily why I am melancholic, or even if I am.

Just William
There was no Yiddish in the house of my childhood; no shouting, no raised voices. I floated in Englishness, and largely through books. All the English children’s books, but also Dickens, Brontë, and Austen. My father would read us a chapter after supper. Joe Gargery, comparing slices of bread; the rotund voice of Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations. My father as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but also as Gollum in The Hobbit. At that time there was no television in South Africa. The Nationalist government thought television an incitement to sedition. It might show black people that the rest of the world was not the same as apartheid South Africa.

Many years later, I did the same reading with my children. But what with books on tape, with television, with many other distractions, I eventually realized that they were letting me read to humor me, to humor my nostalgic recreation of my childhood, and I acceded to their silent request that I not read.

There were also all the children’s classics, such as the Wind in the Willows. Here we were with Badger at the picnic at Henley-on-Klip in an Arthur Rackham illustration. Ratty and Mole in their rowing boat on the river.

But also in the William books by Richmal Crompton with their between-the-wars description and depiction of English country life: the stream, the wood, the vicarage.

I was both in and out of them. I was a William. How different would I have been if I’d still been Haim Józef Kantorovich? Haim, my Hebrew name.

But what was I to do with the vicarage, or the barn, or even those streams? There were no Bar Mitzvahs in these books. No one hid the Afikomen.

And, of course, no black people. Until the late 1980s, under apartheid, beaches, railway crossings, post offices, post office entrances, and so much of South African land were designated either “whites only” or “non-Europeans” only. The dramatis personae of these children’s books was strictly whites only. This dislocation was obvious. There were moments of correspondence in my childhood, like that picnic, to that English world I saw, and moments that became larger and larger evidence of dislocation.

I’m interested in landscape, and in talking about being both in it and out of it, in the being distant from it—certainly about the colonial condition of being at the periphery, drawn to the center, to its distinct and distant promise and allure, and keeping a distance, resisting the centripetal pull, to find a place at the edge of its dream and to hold on to a peripheral thinking.

A horse in a boat
In the book of great landscapes, there was an illustration of The White Horse by John Constable.

The image was familiar from postcards, purchased at museum shops, pinned first to the bedroom wall and then to the studio walls; familiar from its most fragmented form, from the holiday jigsaw puzzles done on the dining room table, trying to work out which fragment of green corresponded to which tree on the box of the puzzle.

This painting and the others like it, and the birthday picnic at Henley-on-Klip, compress the air around me, fixing me in the middle, under the weight of this green richness. But I also step aside from this moment and watch myself in the painting, in the boat on this river.

To pause for a moment at the painting: this was the first of the famous Constable six-footers that won his eventual acceptance into the Royal Academy. The very ordinariness of the image in the picture that Constable had painted had been a block to his professional advancement. He was not painting the sublime.

There were no Alps, no chasms, just the countryside around the River Stour. It’s not a depiction of classical landscape à la Poussin and Claude Lorrain. They’re both far away from this.

We see the river, a broken-down boathouse, the roof of a grander house behind the trees, a barge with a horse in it that would tow the barge. A particular breed of horses was needed to pull barges; they had to be strong enough to pull the load, and nimble enough to jump into and out of the barge when the towpath changed to the other side of the river. The painting shows one such traverse, the bargees poling the barge across the river.

This is what the studio can show us, a process self-evident in the studio, but which can illuminate unseen processes outside it, a world as construction, rather than as discovery.

The bright white of the horse certainly forms the punctum of the image, but as with many of the Constable paintings, the real protagonists are the trees. The clouds are a chorus behind them. The men on the barge, the cows, not even attendant lords in the staged drama—rather punctuation marks on the page.

In recent years, my studio has been filling up with trees.

Not oak or beech, rather trees of the highveld around Johannesburg and of the bushveld slightly farther away. Finding a brush with disorderly bristles to describe the mass of foliage on the tree, allowing the brush, the paper, the ink to resist the Constable lushness.

Double Vision
We invite the world in and then transform it with all the techniques and grammar of the studio. The world is reduced to paint. If we look closely, the leaves are just specific brush marks. We see paint, not leaves. But as we step back, we see not just leaves and a tree, not just paint; but we are also aware of our pleasure in this double vision, in our self-deception. We shift between seduction and a self-awareness. We can’t resist the seduction. It is not an act of will or a relinquishing of will on our part. We can’t stop seeing the leaves.

The seduction of the painting is both with its material—the medium, the brushwork, the texture of paint, the canvas, its depiction—and in the subject: the lush greenery of the tree, the shade, the cool stillness of the water, a seduction increased by its distance from the landscape of Johannesburg, the birthday picnic memorable for the way in which it was a momentary escape to another world.

Digging for gold
Johannesburg is a young city. It was founded in 1886 when gold was discovered. It’s just under 140 years old. I have lived all my 70 years there, half the city’s life. Johannesburg is a city with a purely geological raison d’être: what is in the rocks and the ground. There is no river, no mountain, no trade route, no port. The land has been inhabited for a millennium by different African groups. They were displaced by Afrikaner farmers in the mid-nineteenth century. From 1886 to the Great Depression, Johannesburg was the fastest growing city in the world. Unbelievable gold riches dug out of the ground, first by Cornish miners, then by African miners from South Africa, and particularly from countries around South Africa—Mozambique, a Portuguese colony; Basutoland, now Lesotho, at that time a British protectorate.

The ridges on which the city is built are now verdant: tree-lined streets, full English gardens, fortified enclaves of green and shade, bright blue swimming pools the closest thing to the rivers of Constable. But beyond these gardens the terrain is dry, trees thin; green after summer rains, but parched and bleached for most of the year. The grand houses and gated communities give way to township grids of matchbox houses that have not changed since the days of apartheid, and extensive extending settlements of shacks of corrugated iron and scrap building materials. As if the truth of the city and the country cannot be kept from rising to the surface of the ground.

Sunlight on a leaf
The gardens of the city are constructions—very beautiful constructions, many of them—but we know they are made, not found. This is not how the world is, but how we wish it could be. The Constable landscape feels found; this is the river; these are the trees. This is how it was. He was painting what he saw. Of course, this too is an illusion: an illusion of the translation of the leaf into paint back to leaf. But it is also a different construction. The paintings are constructed, a collage—a tree moved, enlarged, reduced as the composition requires. It has the appearance of coherence, but it is stuck together from fragments. A horse drawn in March is placed on the towpath eight months later. Sunlight at noon on one tree is placed against the dusk shadows of another. This practice of collage, of taking fragments from different sources and constructing a new image, is not new (though only with modernism did artists celebrate the practice and make it the subject itself of paintings). Caspar David Friedrich has sketchbooks of particular branches, twigs, barks of different trees. The trees in his paintings are all built from these different sketches.

Editing the self
This is a natural history of painting, but also a natural history of the self. We present ourselves to the world as a coherent being. “It’s so like him or her,” we say of someone whose behavior or utterances correspond to the person presented to us. But we are aware of the daily work that goes into this presentation. And long-term, how we’re constituted by particular memories, hurts, stories, songs. We are always a collage under construction—taking this fragment, editing out another, consciously or unconsciously. A phrase one recognizes from a parent suddenly appears to shore up a sentence. Of course, there is always a battle between these fragments: between the need to remember, the need to forget.

This is what happens in the studio. The world comes into the studio as images, photographs on the wall, as newspapers, emails, memories of conversation, books, postcards. There it is fragmented. The fragments are rearranged and sent back out into the world as a drawing, a film. We are aware of the artificiality of the construction even as we are beguiled by it. This is what the studio can show us, a process self-evident in the studio, but which can illuminate unseen processes outside it, a world as construction, rather than as discovery.

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Excerpted from A Natural History of the Studio by William Kentridge. Copyright © 2026 by William Kentridge. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, GrovePress, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.