Whenever and wherever I traveled my reactions to the cities and countries that I visited were coloured by the cards that I bought. Since these represented nations and localities as the themselves wanted to be seen, it seemed that their vision was more authentic than any I might impose by drawing or photography: here were the true emblems of the genius loci. Even an uncertainty of attitude could be found reflected in a country's postcards as expressed in the paintings that came out of my visits to Germany (the Berlin Wall pictures and Ein Deutsches Requiem) where the publishers, seeking to express in views of the Berlin Wall the brutality of its structure, still could not stifle their necessary aesthetic of permanent sunshine and dreaming skies, thereby asserting, after their own fashion, an ambivalence which paralleled my own.

That one could not betray people by quoting from a depicted life in which they had already betrayed themselves, was a liberating discovery, especially in South Africa where my feelings about the country were amply mirrored in cards produced there by white South Africans. Corroborative commentary could of course be found in A Human Document. The paintings which linked black and white skin to the skies and grass of the Republic shared their imagery with those of Berlin as an artificially divided place: prejudice could match concrete in solidity, and as time would prove, in fragility. I do not believe of course that art changes anything or can intervene in politics. I am sure though that Les Murray is right to suggest that art ever provides the 'New Poem' which clears a space into which reality may move.  > >

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