☏ S.d.B.     The drawings, collected in this way, seem like so many sheets of an unwieldy notebook. Do you keep a notebook?

G.G.     No, there’s piles of paper, on desks, in my studio, on all the surfaces around. I mean, you’ve seen my studio.

⌂ Thursday 10 October, visit #1: “I’m unlonelying my studio,” she announces, presenting one of three chairs in which she’s been busy seating people, rendering them quickly in paint, a kind of sketching in oil that captures essence: the particular angle of a limb, mannerisms, posture, clothes. She might pick and choose elements from these paintings to be staged together in later paintings – tableaux made from bits of guests brought together at imagined gatherings.

☏ G.G.     There are sheets of A4 paper, and Sharpies and Kokis, and I stick these papers all over the walls. The drawings are utilised. The notebook is too ‘iced’, too frozen a thing. These papers are disposable.

I’ve gone through phases of going to get nice paper and charcoal and no, it’s not me. It doesn’t work for me. I have my Hitech printer and my A4 paper and I grab a big pen and I write my lists and draw.

⌂ Wednesday 13 November, visit #3: On Georgina’s birthday, together with the artist Moshekwa Langa, we take her a bunch of metallic balloons: a baby pterodactyl, a swan, a peachy foil shell,‘Happy Birthday Queen’ on a crown.

“Sit still-ish. I’m just doing your head.” She’s painting Moshekwa and because he has this natural way about him of making everyone feel part of things, he keeps turning his head to find me on the sofa, included in the conversation. “That’s fine,” she encourages him. “We won’t spend too much time here. I don’t have an attention span of more than half an hour. Your other ear. Yes, like that…. Life painting is new for me,” she tells him. “I’m not good at it.”

Georgina paints wearing blue latex gloves and she holds anything between one and five paintbrushes, a trowel, a cloth, in her hands at a time.

She sets one foot on the easel’s base like stepping on the pedal of a sewing machine.

Moshekwa and Georgina talk about Durban, where Georgina is from and where she dreams of returning one day to a house on the coast, were those houses not unaffordable.

“I was once saving up for a house in Durban. A woman named Bridget was encouraging me,” says Moshekwa.

“Durban City has gotten abandoned.”

The windows in her studio are wide open. The balloons skirmish in the wind. Georgina laughs at an Art Fair party, “Covid had just finished and you remember that time, everyone was on top of each other like a mosh pit. I was with Jody Paulsen and we couldn’t get to the bar so we were trying to get water out of a tap.”

☏ G.G.     Why is the painting so stuffy? The drawing is bigger and skewer. Say, there’s a picture of a parrot that I’ve found somewhere and printed out. The drawing is a way of digesting and owning, deconstructing and understanding. The original image and the drawing, together, then provide a direction. They are a guide as the painting develops.

The drawing is an armature. The painting gets unwieldy: the paint gets too thick and can become monstrous. There is a simplicity in the strength of the line – that armature – it’s not a map exactly, but it is a guide to get back to the shape. Mentally, to have drawn it is a way to understand it.

S.d.B.      Do your paintings always start with drawing?

G.G.     No. There’s nothing hard and fast. But if I am stuck I might go back to doing a drawing. Also, titles come through drawings and word play. Maybe I get given flowers and then I do a quick sketch, and then I’m listening to the radio and the song ‘You can’t hurry love’ comes on. And that will become a title for a painting.

⌂ Thursday 10 October, visit #1: “What is the name of the beagle?” I ask.

“Which one is the beagle?” She replies. “The little seal is Petal.”

She wears an apron printed with what looks like TS Elliot’s Cats. Underneath the apron, a work uniform consisting of a purple Club Med Mauritius T-shirt and polka-dot leggings cut above the knee, green Crocs, and a side pony fastened by a scrunchie. She looks like Sarah, my arch nemesis in Grade 1 who married Laurie, whom I loved, under the jungle gym. Sarah was so stylish that her mum got her a perm, aged six.

“You look like you dressed to match your car,” Georgina says of my grey tracksuit.

I have wanted Georgina to fuck with my face for so long, since seeing her portrait of the artist Jody Paulsen, his nose a streak of highlight, two eye-like hollows beneath blue eyes – as if his sight is doubled. I’m writing about Georgina as she’s painting me. We’re also both editing as we go because, when the paintings (she completes three to my single paragraph) are finished, I appear sans notebook and pen. She’s caught me from the chin down. No face! No messing with! Later, on Monday 5 December, she’ll talk about how, when painting people from life, she feels compelled to flatter her sitter. Not so when painting from photographs. Which is perhaps why I didn’t receive the bulbous nose or droopy eyes she constructs from glooping paint over time or through what she refers to as “welding” – the process of using more oil paint as a glue to attach pieces of canvas cut away from previous attempts. Portraits that become monstrous, those that don’t quite work, can always be Dr Frankensteined into current paintings.

☏ S.d.B.     You’re very funny. Some of the drawings are funny. We’ve also included a couple of your cartoons in the publication – not everyone knows you as a cartoonist.

G.G.     I enjoy the immediacy of the drawing, where I can get bogged down in the paintings to the point where I haven’t resolved certain projects. I did once try to incorporate drawing into paintings: at one point, I tried to do oil paintings where I made a white surface and then did drawings and sketches, but it lost its flavour. There’s something about being at ones desk with a Koki pen… and maybe that’s what it is meant to be. Maybe. The paintings have elements of humour and form. For example something I’m thinking about now, ‘Self portrait as Dua Lipa’, has huge, sculptural lips. It’s about bad fan art and desire and the sadness that comes with the wish to be something impossible. Especially women, we’re given so much of that. It’s tragic. How absurd and sad and silly.

⌂ Monday 2 December, visit #5: Walking the lane between her house and the studio with Daniel Malan who is curating this publication, and Ben Johnson, who designs it, she says “I don’t have a home anymore I have a studio.” The spread across studio to house is recent, a side effect of unfulfilled renovation promises and new living arrangements combined with inordinate amounts of work to do towards two upcoming exhibitions that will occur two months apart. There’s a pillow and duvet on the couch in her lounge in front of a large painting of flowers, a wall of paper notes and drawings, a table of pallets, paint on the kitchen floor, a dismembered screen at the windows to create three panels for painting. The studio holds another two large paintings – the lounge wall offered the only remaining space to work at this size. This is the way unfolding happens, making room for making, above all else. One unfinished room in the house she made into ‘dad’s room’ while he was visiting for an extended period. At the time of writing this, he left the day before yesterday. She stowed him in this room, painted him in this room, stored the paintings of him in this room. He’s sitting in chairs with a dog at his feet, he’s reading, he’s at the pool. “He became quite bossy,” she says. “Paint me cleaning the the pool, Luv.” “Paint me in the water.” Playing the art director on set.

☏ S.d.B.     Is there a best time to draw?

G.G.     I sometimes forget to draw because you get involved in trying to solve 35 paintings on the go. My best time to draw is on the phone – good doodling time.

S.d.B.     These drawings have a throwaway quality, in that they’re not kept in any sort of pristine way, and yet they are saved, and even in unfolding them, together we (Ben, Dan, you, me) didn’t discard the ones that have textures or things on them, the ‘mess’ of working life, like muddied footprints all over a page, or old paint splotches that mean detritus like googly eyes are stuck to them.

G.G.     There are so many drawings. I think this is perhaps five percent squirrelled way into a drawer. Often, I’m moving studios. I’ve moved studios so many times, from Durban, Cape Town, Mexico, and at the end, during a studio clean up, I keep only a few and everything else goes into the bin. The ones that do end up existing, it’s part luck.

⌂ Sunday 10 November, visit #2: (Khanya Mashabela has baked cookies, Dan has brought along a cheesecake from New York Bagels, and together with Moshekwa and Josh Ginsburg we are drinking lots of cups of coffee from Georgina’s Nespresso served in pretty teacups and discussing whether we should wait to include a drawing of flowers that is taped to the wall, currently in use towards a giant painting.)

Josh picks up a face that Georgina has cut from another painting and fits it to his own. “You should make masks,” he suggests. “We could stage a masked ball.” There are so many pieces around the studio that warrant handling. Each of us holds something; palm-sized canvas flowers are being peeled from the edges of paint pallets and the smokers fiddle with their cigarettes.

The next morning, a WhatsApp message from Georgina. “Thanks for coming yesterday”, she holds up a painted face with large, distinguished teeth, a brunette bouffant – part Elvis, part Dracula – into which she has cut slots for the eyes, ready for the ball.

☏ S.d.B.     Why is it, though, that for this publication, we were all drawn to one drawing that is the most messed up? The most stood on and crumpled?

G.G.     I made a painting called ‘Lovers Discourse’ at a time I was working in Joburg and my ex was in Cape Town and we separated for quite a few months. I did a big bird painting and with my work with birds, the works are often about relationships.

Before, in the past, when lovers were separated, there would be letter writing back and forth, evidence of an eloquent expression of great love. What I found myself left with after that period of separation was this squabble of WhatsApps and everything that was said was so mundane. I felt, this is such an interesting modern use of language and a disappointing result. If something happened to me and people tried to understand my relationship through these WhatsApps, it would be quite fucking dire. And then maybe also it would be very relatable, this longing for something else and the disappointment at reality.

S.d.B.     And then we pick that piece of paper up off of the floor and go, “This one, we love this one, we will rescue it.”

G.G.     The thumbnail sketch is very art schooley, but I’ve never abandoned it. There’s so much of ‘Art School 101’ that is ‘the thumbnail sketch’. But if I’m doing a three-metre painting I could start with a five-centimetre drawing. For the bigger works, the ones that require more time and thought and planning… Cameron Platter is a good friend of mine and I have such respect for his practice. We’re both only children. There something about being an only child, about self entertainment, making something, always drawing.

(She pauses here to talk to Vasco who is helping her today to rescue paint.)

G.G.     Vasco is helping me cut open tubes of paint. When there’s paint left in the tube it’s difficult to get the paint out and so we’re making these little mountains today of half-finished white paint and half-finished yellow paint. I’ll mix colours from there.

(It’s also because her shoulder is a bit sore from all the “reaching up and into all these corners” that is necessary for the large paintings. All the work is done alone. She paints everything, across multiple works. Visiting this way, across weeks, we’re getting to see them bloom.)

S.d.B.     How does it feel to see the drawings collected up from the pile and put together in this way?

G.G.     I’m the opposite of an archivist. I’m always interested in what I’m doing next. But it was kind of funny to see those sketches called ‘Pool Paintings’. I’d been painting swimmers and I recently thought, “Well, it’s summer, and I have a pool next to my studio, I should paint people in the pool.” Seeing those drawings again reinforced that. There are things I saw for the first time after a long while, drawings for paintings already made, and propositions I might pick up on. The list of people at lunch, a proposition called ‘Worst Guests Ever’ – that is interesting. And maybe I’ll make that T-shirt.