TERRY ANGELOS: CONVERSATIONS FROM THE CURIOSITY SHOP
O&A visited botanical artist, Terry Angelos, in her fascinating studio above her Westville home. This story was born out of our discussions
WORDS AND IMAGES: SHIRLEY LE GUERN
Perched above her Westville home with a breathtaking view over the lush greenery that surrounds the Palmiet River, Terry Angelos’s studio is part Dickensian curiosity shop and part eagle’s eyrie. Populated with books, artefacts and collectibles, it is reminiscent of a school science laboratory or natural history museum but with a bright feeling of imaginative exploration.
This beautiful space is perfect for Terry. In her own words, she is “naturally curious” and gifted with a rebellious imagination born out of a carefree African childhood during the seventies in a small town known as Sinoia (now Chinhoyi) in what was then Rhodesia. As a tomboy, she was often found camping and fishing alongside her landscape artist father.
AN AFRICAN CHILDHOOD
“My dad’s nickname was Kalahari Keith. He was totally a nature and bird man who painted in the bush. His paintings were landscape orientated, but very much about seeing the beauty of nature. He had a very fine, light touch,” she recalls.
Her father was a high school art teacher and her mother a primary school teacher who, she says, indulged in all things creative – everything from batik to macrame and more.
“If she was busy in the kitchen, there weren’t cooking smells coming out of there. It was the smell of candle wax or of her drying and pressing flowers,” she remembers.
“I spend most of my time barefoot in the bush, in the trees. I was just very lucky to have been born into an environment that really encouraged creativity and art. Art and English were what I was good at and what I was drawn to. I always joke that we didn’t play with a lot of toys. We were outside climbing trees.”
Terry was an avid collector of butterflies that she pinned on polystyrene in her room. She admits that it was almost inevitable that her art took on a “very naturalist, collector, curiosity cabinet feeling” to the point where many of the objects displayed in her home today are findings from nature.
Push aside any idea of the child who loved going to museums and revelled in the displays of bugs and sample jars turning into a bespectacled scientist. Terry went on to study fine art for two years and drama for one.
She says this began with a Durban high school teacher who saw potential in a somewhat unconventional student: “A lot of the girls at school were doing these very detailed, accurate drawings. This was the typical school drawing, certainly back in the eighties. I was terribly ADHD and would spend 45 minutes of the lesson pacing up and down listening to music. Then, she’d say, take a sketchbook and go outside. I would go for 15 minutes and scribble, scribble, scribble, put something messy together – but she saw something in that. She never tried to push me into any mold. She let me just be myself.”
FINDING THE AUTHOR AND THE ARTIST
When she went to university, Terry says she couldn’t have found anything more opposite to the very special teacher who encouraged her to never give up.
“The lecturers tried to strip you down, to break you. They said that if you were good at art at school, that meant nothing. You almost felt like you were being penalized. I found this very academic, very stuffy, very intellectual. I just couldn’t buy into it. It was futile.”
For an immature art student who was rebellious, into partying and finding her identity, this wasn’t a nurturing environment.
The drama department was better but not what she describes as her skill set. By 1989, Terry had dropped out of her degree and headed to London for a gap year.
The rest of her London story is relegated in her book White Trash. After completing some writing courses, she published this three years ago.
To borrow from the book cover, this is the remarkable memoir of how 19 year-old Terry finds herself in London’s underbelly and begins working as a high-class call girl. By the time she’s 20, she’s embroiled in the underworld of the Chinese mafia, depraved clients and a perilous blackmail scheme.
“I waited for my children to be grown up so I could have adult conversations with all of them about what happened and wanting to write the book. But, from my early twenties, I knew I would write a book one day, I just knew I had phenomenal stories to tell. It is all part of that thing of really owning who you are. This is who I am. This is what I am. This is me. It’s very liberating. In terms of my art, I’ve always loved words. I love the overlap of the two, so I’ve quite enjoyed trying to find out how these things all fit together.”
In 1990, Terry returned to South Africa and settled in Johannesburg where she tried to complete her degree at Wits. It was then that she began doing murals. Struggling to pay her rent and study as she painted her way around the restaurants of Joburg, she eventually dropped out of her degree once more and considered switching to studying fashion.
But she soon realised that she couldn’t pay for the tuition, let alone buy the fabric as she was barely making ends meet.
“For the longest time, I just labelled myself as creative, but not an artist. I explored lots of different creative things. I ran a children’s birthday party business for about nine years. I used to paint furniture. I did a lot of creative events and got involved in the House and Garden Show,” she says.
The turning point came while she was managing the children’s section of a decorators on display event in Umhlanga.
Whilst perusing the art on display in redecorated flats and passageways, she realised that she could produce similar work to pieces that were selling for over R3 000. It was time to start drawing again.
She showed what she describes as “very fearful and cutesy” artworks to a friend who owned an on trend home décor shop. Her friend asked for all the drawings she had, framed them and put them on the wall. The first one sold that day.
With this confidence boost and she began to develop her style as an artist: “I did a lot of art that was very nature orientated. But there was and would always be this kind of slightly, offbeat, quirky, edgy and a little bit dark influence coming through.”
She supplemented her income with teaching, workshops, classes and art retreats. Somewhere along this road, Terry also revisited her love for fashion design, opening a boutique, called anthology, in Windermere Centre for which she designed all the clothing. Defeated and distressed by the very tough world of retail, she eventually moved on.
“Life has a habit of sort of shutting doors and pushing you in different directions without you realizing it at the time,” she observes.
DISCOVERING SHONGWENI
She returned to both her art and retail in a slightly different format when she decided to set up a pop up shop at the Shongweni Market on Saturday mornings.
“If I do things, I go all in. I knew who came to Shongweni and what they’re looking for so, while I decided to stay true to myself, I also realised that I had to be very specific and very intentional about what I do.”
Terry had also already begun rethinking the juxta positioning of art and textiles. Having already done design work that had been printed by others, including Mr Price for which she did five collections, she was eager to explore creating her own collection.
“I’ve got some customers who love what I do but say that they have literally got no more space on their walls. So, art is limited. Fabric opens a lot more opportunities to create something that people can buy,” she says.
Because she works primarily with watercolour, she cannot work directly on fabric. Instead, all work is done on paper. During Covid, Terry upskilled herself, learning how to scan these images, creating clean digital images.
Although she started printing on cotton in around 2019, she soon found that it was too fragile for tableware and that the colours faded. It also doesn’t wash very well. The alternative was to print on a fabric manufactured from plastic waste which is hardy and fade proof and also aligns with her support for sustainability and love for nature.
Although Terry started off with just three fabric designs which were all botanical, she has since added a sea collection, a bird collection and bee and safari collections. These were used on pillow covers, table cloths and tea towels. Her range has now evolved to include scarves and aprons.
Having cash flow from the Shongweni market has empowered her to keep developing. It is here that she puts on her business hat, identifying strong sellers and looking at things that are less popular and can drop off her list or be replaced.
Her protea table runner is a best seller both with locals looking for fashionable home décor and the many travellers who have been visiting friends and family and are looking for something uniquely South African to fit into a bulging suitcase.
Again, her own unique style lingers: “I think you have to have a distinctive style if you want to become an established artist. If you are always chopping and changing, people can’t get a handle on what you’re about. So, even if I explore something new, it’s always going to be in my style. I’m never going to go and do luminous pink polka dots – although, I suppose I could lay them over something and interpret them in my own way,” she smiles.
What will always be the core of her art is the pen work which creates an etched look and her ever present fascination with the infinite natural world.
“I love something that is fresh and light and whimsical. It’s always quirky. My art has that museum type thing. I don’t paint composite pictures. I paint a subject or a specimen rich with botanical meaning,” she says pointing to her own little library of nature books filled with illustrations that are reminiscent of school and botanical libraries during the seventies and eighties. These days, books like these are hard to find.
At the market, Terry has also built up an audience that follows her art and wants to see her latest creations. “I can take something out and call them over and they know they’ve been shown something that not everyone gets to see.”
ART IN ANOTHER WORLD
Not all of Terry’s work makes it to a very commercial space like the Shongweni market.
As with many artists, she goes through phases, working obsessively with one particular theme until she’s done. An example is the somewhat quirky figures that she added to vintage crockery. These were displayed as far and wide as Cape Town.
A few still exist in her studio but she has moved on to modifying many of her original prints, transforming them back into original artworks by adding unexpected elements by painting over images and adding what she calls ephemera – curious things and little collectibles gleaned during nature walks or trips to thrift shops.
These different elements are combined into something that resembles an interior decorator’s mood board before Terry begins each transformative journey: “It is almost a combination of things that nobody would think of putting together. I love assemblage, or altered art. It’s the juxtaposition of taking two things people wouldn’t combine and aligning them. Sometimes the commonality might be a colour scheme. It takes me back to my childhood. There’s a nostalgia about it. I think there is almost a vintage feel as opposed to this ridiculously mass produced, very clinical and linear world that we live in,” she explains.
Looking for unlikely collectibles is the perfect excuse for Terry to head for a thrift shop: “I love bits and bobs. I’ll have an idea, and then I’ll know what I’m looking for, and put it together. I love collage because the minute you take something and put it in a different context, you’ve got an association. When this is married with that, it doesn’t throw you off but gets you to see something in a different way,” she explains.
Her nature walks are similar: “I’m always looking at textures, shapes and colours. To me, nature is full of little treasures. I may go along and see a little bird’s nest. I have found a treasure, something beautiful or fragile and I want to capture it, keep it. Otherwise, it just disappears.”
Lately, Terry has been considering doing an exhibition again – something that she hasn’t embarked on since settling in at the Shongweni market.
“I used to be quite disciplined pre-Covid. My goal was to do one exhibition a year. That was purely about me being creative. If I didn’t sell anything, I didn’t care, it was just creative expression. It was taking an idea and exploring it. I enjoy the venue and how it is put together. I did one in the old station building where I set the whole exhibition up on an old counter as if it was a science room. I displayed paintings on rods so they looked like old science posters, and I had lots of things in bottles and displays. I loved not just making the art, but creating the space that you experienced it in.”
In addition to exhibitions, she says she will be writing another book.
On leaving, book under arm and various other creations in hand, there is the sense that this is not the end of the conversation and that, somewhere down the road, Terry’s explorations will reignite this dialogue.
Thinking over her story, perhaps the best conclusion actually comes from the Dickens novel, The Old Curiosity Shop: “There are chords in the human heart – strange, varying strings –which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest and respond at last to the slightest casual touch.”
To find out more about Terry Angelos and her art, visist www.terryangelos.com or visit her shop at the Shognweni Market.
