Ainslie's Personal Orientation

This term, 'orientation' refers to Ainslie’s actions, which were shaped by his attitude towards living and working as a painter and teacher in South Africa during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

These were the years when apartheid tightened its grip on the lives of all its inhabitants. Life for those who did not comply or who refused to submit meant living with varying forms of danger, especially from the state. What was Ainslie's orientation towards this situation?

When Bill and Fieke Ainslie arrived in Johannesburg in 1963 after two years in what was then Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe in 1980), they knew well what to expect. They set themselves up in a flat in Hillbrow, the part of the city least affected by racial laws. Then, after the birth of their son and when Ainslie had completed his second solo exhibition at the Adler-Fielding Gallery in the city centre, they moved into one half of a large, rented house in Parktown. There was room for living, for guests and for a studio enclosed by a broad, private garden.

From this base, the Ainslies developed extensive links with people, and their section of the house was persistently active with visitors, students and friends. For example, they could accommodate the artist Dumile Feni in the house for two years. He needed shelter, support and safety and these he received from Bill and Fieke Ainslie. During that time, Feni produced work for highly successful exhibitions at Gallery 101, also in the city centre, and elsewhere in the late 1960s.

Seen together, the work of Ainslie and Feni was engaged, not in the strident forms of resistance or protest, but as art that emerged from their responses to the swirl of daily interaction with people and issues in actual circumstances.

One key to Ainslie's commitment to art-making was largely the need to unlearn, to discard, to reject what he had inherited. His early work, such as that in the 1960s, bristles with attempts at rejecting the stereotypes, assumptions and attitudes that characterised his personal legacy.¹

Feni, by contrast, was a refugee in his own country, and initiated a new genre of drawing and sculpting. He walked away from what his fellow artists from similar backgrounds were doing. His voice was a fresh one, challenging everyone to reconsider how they were reflecting and depicting their worlds.

As a person who was actively interested in political issues, Ainslie had to experience some of his friends being sentenced to long terms in jail. He had to acknowledge the killing of people by the police, especially young people. He had to feel the loss of colleagues who went into exile as well as the banning of over 40 local writers who lived abroad.

What did he do? He tried first to participate in the work of the non-racial Liberal Party of South Africa, but it dissolved when it became illegal in 1968 to have a multiracial political party. He did not join the underground sabotage group, the African Resistance Movement, nor did he work in secret as a communist or 'fellow traveller'.

From the mid—1960s onwards, he was under constant surveillance by the security police. This consisted of monitoring all his visitors, interrogating detainees about Ainslie's activities, telephone tapping, interference with his mail and, later, in the 1980s at the JAF, sudden intrusion by police deep in the night to search the premises. Interestingly, he was never arrested, and he continued to do everything as he saw fit in plain sight.

In many ways, Ainslie's story is one of disturbance, disruption and forces of disorientation. Within all this, he retained his focus, painting and teaching and becoming increasingly influential.

Ainslie's first crisis was his need to be an African painter in Africa. This he achieved over time through association and involvement with several people such as Dumile Feni (artist), Mongane Wally Serote (poet), Lionel Abrahams (writer) and Barney Simon (theatre director), active people who shared his passion for the arts and humanities in their determination to reflect and engage with their local world. Ainslie’s major achievements were to move his art from figurative painting to abstraction, and to establish arts centres where all could meet and work. In doing so, he created what has been called ‘another country’ in its radical difference from the orthodoxies of South African life.

It is important to add that, in demonstrating what 'another country' might be like, Ainslie shared strongly similar impulses with several South Africans in the 1980s. His search for how he should orient his life and that of others in an unjust society was shared in many parts of the country.

In his dealings with people who approached and worked with him, Ainslie was quietly attentive and confident in responding with both sympathy and critique. His analyses as well as his decisions about people and situations usually had a moral element. A close student friend said that his decisions, though moral, were not always practical. He was known in some instances to put morality before kindness.

His Protestant form of Christianity gave him the freedom to think independently and the ability to argue on an ethical basis about what could and should be done in response to the injustices of apartheid. For example, Ainslie was deeply interested in the role played by German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Lutheran resistance in the 1930s to the state-controlled church of the Nazis. He was unafraid of ideas and explored many other forms of religious and spiritual consciousness. This included the I Ching, Sufism, shamanism, traditional healing and the thinking of people such as the English poet Robert Graves and the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. What links these areas of attention is the significance Ainslie gave to what he called 'religious consciousness'. Central to this aspect of Ainslie’s abiding interest was his reaching for a wholeness, an inclusiveness that gave due importance to what he believed were the spiritual dimensions of human life.

Strong and decisive as his young character was, Ainslie was deeply influenced during his student days in the 1950s by his friends, especially Catherine Shallis (later Brubeck). Interviewed in 1999, she said:

He was educated and encouraged by his lecturers in art and philosophy, and by political figures outside the university such as ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli; Liberal Party president Alan Paton; Indian Congress leader Chota Motala; and the artist Selby Mvusi. In particular, he found the Reverend Calvin Cook an important thinker about religion and society. It was no accident that Cook conducted Ainslie’s wedding and funeral.²

In 1960, Ainslie married Sophia (‘Fieke’) Jacomina Elisabeth Jansen-Schottel, of Dutch descent, who would go on to devote her life to his success as an artist. They had a son, Sholto William (1963), and a daughter, Sophia (1966). Both children are based in the United States and work in the world of the arts. Sophia is an artist and teacher of art in Boston; Sholto is an artist who lives in New York.

In many respects, Fieke Ainslie complemented her husband well. In contrast to his warm and measured intensities, she was quick to spot opportunities and alternatives. Her speech, with an attractive accent from her childhood in the Netherlands, often combined multiple motives and lines of thought simultaneously – generating a form of what has been called ‘functional ambiguity’.³

Their daughter, Sophia Ainslie, is quoted as saying, ‘Together Bill and Fieke made a great force as Fieke was intuitive, physical and business-like, and Bill diplomatic and visionary’.⁴

Fieke Ainslie’s energy was partly from a refusal to be bound down. She never had a permanent home, she refused to return to the Netherlands after Ainslie’s death and she was stimulated by a strong sense of justice for others, especially for young Black artists.

As a key partner in Ainslie’s career, she attended every business transaction, was known to remove a painting from his easel because he dithered over whether it was complete or not and, after his death, cropped unstretched canvases for sale and show.

Her commitment to enhancing Ainslie’s career was unremitting and she supervised enrolments and fees, ensured the maintenance of the physical environment in the house and garden, and created an environment conducive to aesthetic creativity. She and Bill were the centre of the JAF’s life. Beyond the creative citadel of the foundation, he moved among networks of arts-related and political activities. From her base in the JAF, Fieke cultivated donors and supporters, particularly among the diplomatic corps. Their dinner parties, receptions and evening events such as poetry readings and musical performances brought together richly disparate interests and preoccupations.

This account of Ainslie’s personal orientation towards living and working in the second half of the twentieth century in South Africa has chosen to focus on some of his qualities and actions. In summary, these are:

• his adaptive responses to disruptions and disturbances
• his interest in people’s creative capacities
• his openness to influence by people while sustaining his personal values and religious consciousness
• his search for wholeness in his life and art while shedding those factors that inhibit creativity
• his sharing a life with a person who was the negation and affirmation of his core values
• his assembling communities of students and practitioners in the visual arts.