A YEAR OF LIFE SEALED IN WOOD
BY ROGER DEAN

The Star Tonight!

Wednesday, September 21 1983

An unusual work of art went on limited show last week – and has now been removed from view at the artist’s request. Yet it kept its creator busy for up to seven hours a day every day for a year, working often in the early hours of the morning or late at night to carve out a kind of personal calendar for himself in wood ...

If you didn’t catch Willem Boshoff’s latest life-work at a local gallery last weekend, you will have to wait another year for a fresh chance.

That is the time the elaborate personal calendar in wood, a de-tailed record of the artist’s aims

and achievements over the past year, is to be tucked out of sight.

It is a task he has stuck to reli-giously – and the epithet is well chosen – without missing a single

day. Every night he has added another block to the collection, another page to the diary, as it were, never once holding one over for the next morning.

Now the 370 immaculately carved blocks will be stored, not as they are seen here in five mammoth matching panels, but in more com-pact form in a multi-tiered “parking garage” carefully carpentered to fit.

The order of their keeping has been changed too – from the strict chronological arrangement of the panels to an alphabetical order reflecting the names of the differ-ent woods used.

For no two blocks are carved out of the same material. That at least was the intention, though Boshoff

admits there may be eight or ten inadvertent duplications, stemming from the difficulty of absolute iden-tification.

The artist is a trifle mystical about all these manifestations. Each wood, he says, has a sound of its own, and an ineffable private name, rather like T S Eliot’s cats. The numbers involved are signi-ficant too.

There are 370 carvings because they square easily into ten rows of 37 – and three plus seven equals ten. Each panel in the frame is the same length as the height of the artist.

The series was begun on Septem-ber 12 1982 because that was Willem Boshoff’s birthday. It was continued right up to September 18 this year because that is his sister’s birthday.

And the few days between the two celebrations is the only time it has been on public view.

“I have been playing with the concept of secrecy in my work,” Boshoff said, “because I believe it plays a vital part in nature and in the universe. But I have tried to use it creatively.

“This is an intensely personal statement, and I look upon it in the same light as a book. A book is closed and concealed once it is read until you reopen it, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, for a reminder, or for a refreshment.

“That is how I see this work: as a sort of spiritual medicine. Though I am happy to show it to anyone else who might be interested.”

Part of the key rests in two red notebooks that currently lie buried in the “basement” of the tightly stacked storage frame, along with all the chippings from the wooden blocks.

These contain the legend to the elaborate symbols that adorn each individual piece of wood – all as carefully programmed over a period of years as they have been pa-tiently chiselled in the final work.

Each block is divided in two, re-presenting the work of morning andafternoon, but also reflecting the difference between aims and achievement industry and evalua-tion.

The left-hand half is carved in straight verticals and diagonals, and is divided in turn into three different sections representing obli-gations, pleasures and sacrifices.

Nothing mundane or routine is included, Boshoff says, but there is reflected any un-usual duty or meditation performed, any forfeit of pleasure, special effort or dedi-cation.

“It might be a visit to a friend that wasn’t strictly called for,” he said. “An exceptional purchase – virtually anything out of the ordi-nary.”

The right-hand side, by contrast, reflects Boshoff’s assessment of his own achievements in the day. It is carved in circles and curves, and is a kind of checklist on how he matched his goals and what satis-faction they gave him.

In the notebooks describing this work method is appended, at the end of each day, a little epigra-mmatic thought or maxim to sum up his reflections.

Some are light and silly, others deep and serious.

Example: “When he took the bad ones out, the box was no longer full”. Or: “If you want to do justice to bad luck, ignore it.” Or more plaintively: I got to be as old as I am in only 31 years.”

This labour of love occupied Boshoff for anything from three to seven hours a day, according to the hardness of wood he was working. And that in addition to a full-time job at the Witwatersrand Tech-nikon, plus daily running that put him in last year’s Comrades. “But at the same time it hasn’t

quite been as reclusive, as ascetic an enterprise as some I have undertaken in the past. It’s been a very social exercise, especially gathering the wood.

“That alone has taken me all over South Africa, from the Cape to the Lowveld, and I’ve met some wonderful people in the course of it. They get very excited, you know, when they learn what you are doing.”

So, how does he feel after a year of such labours, now that the period of rest is at hand? Deeply relieved, obviously, yet with a certain “that’s that” flatness in his attitude. The elation of the early days has gone, as well as the frustration and the rebellious-ness.

Perhaps the chief lesson he has learnt is summed up in one of his little epigrams. “Patience is not exercised in the things we like,” he wrote one struggling evening, “however laborious that might be.”