LUCY WILES
CHICKENS
WATERCOLOUR
170 X 245MM
Lucy Wiles was born in Johannesburg on 24th November 1918 to Thomas and Pauline Townsend. She went to Waverley High School and, although her best subject at school was
Lucy Wiles was born in Johannesburg on 24th November 1918 to Thomas and Pauline Townsend. She went to Waverley High School and, although her best subject at school was Art, she trained as a nurse. She says as a child she was always frightened of school and could not remember a happier time than lying in the long grass as a small child with her brother and sister John and Elizabeth before school going age, with the loving attention of her mother always on them. This perhaps explains her quiet modesty all her life, not competing with other artists, and leading her own life and not getting too involved with the mainstream art world.
She married Norman Mullins of the Grahamstown family and had two daughters, Pauline and Jane, and became a farmer’s wife on the farm Assegaai Bush in the Eastern Cape, until they moved to Butterworth where she started painting. On offer were the beautiful indigenous Xhosa people, still then in their brilliantly ochre and orange blanket wear, and she became entranced with these people. She started by fashioning friezes, peopled by these wondrously vivid Xhosa people. She became known as “ephoto” in the area, as she eventually started seeking out the trading stores in the countryside and paying models to sit for her on the spot. It was a remarkable experience for her children, who ran riot out in the country, making mud huts with the local children in the river beds and playing in the shadows of the sacks of grain and sweets in the stores.
Her marriage to Norman Mullins came to an end and she moved alone, like a frontier woman, to Engcobo, where she established herself as a full time artist, and sold her paintings and friezes through the Peddie and Butterworth Hotels, painting occasionally with Constance Greaves.
By 1954 her only art training had been a three week course in Durban with Nils Anderson, who she greatly admired. As her parents were living in Knysna, and had got to know the now well known artist W G Wiles, it was arranged that she would go for a painting holiday to him. This she did, and met Brian, his youngest son, who she married. He was not an artist at the time but described himself as lotus eating and writing a satirical novel in the loft of his parents’ house, being, in some sense, the first hippie! His first painting was done on their honeymoon which Lucy insisted should be in Oudtshoorn, as she wanted to paint there. She was busy on a canvas, and eventually squeezed out a bit of paint onto a rock, gave him a canvas and told him to get on with it!
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