Notes

Beastly anthropomorphic creatures such as this human-crocodile hybrid are an integral part of Norman Catherine's fantastical vision, which was much admired by the late David Bowie. They have played a key role in the artist's rehearsal of his core themes of avarice, cruelty, excess and psychological estrangement. "Over the years Catherine's creatures have become the embodiment of his creative mythology," notes his biographer Hazel Friedman.¹ Crocodiles first began appearing in Catherine's paintings in the late 1980s. Catherine's reptiles possess no fixed meaning. Sometimes they are fire-breathing creatures, yet again humans in animal skin. They have occasionally appeared as visualisations of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's story of a patient who complained about a crocodile hiding under his bed.

This lot forms part of a group of unsettling portraits depicting brawny male figures made in 1993. It shares compositional affinities with Unidentified (1993), a portrait study whose subject resembles the monolithic human figures known as Moai on Easter Island. The prominent red tears in this work meld allusions to pain and violence with contrition. It seems to visualise a question posed by artist Judith Mason, who also used animals to depict stark psychological states: "Where does the human begin and the animal end?"²The work also recalls Micha Kgasi, a nineteenth-century Tswana evangelist and sculptor who used allegorical crocodile figures for moral instruction.³ Catherine, though, imposes no fixed meaning on his work: "People can take what they want from my work. My approach is intuitive, emotional... My art is a never-ending story in which I constantly articulate as many characters and personae embroiled in the plot as possible."⁴

1. Hazel Friedman. (2000) Norman Catherine. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, p.122.
2. Judith Mason. (2017) from obituary written by artist's daughter, Tamar Mason, 25 January - http://www.artprintsa.com/judith-mason.html
3. Elza Miles. (1997) Land and Lives: A Story of Early Black Artists. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, p.42.
4. Friedman, op.cit., p.119.

Literature

Hazel Friedman. (2000) Norman Catherine, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions. Illustrated in colour on page 111