What is the mood of your city today?

Frustrated? Stressed? Like chilled hey china? I’ve been asked to tackle the question of: “What is the mood of your city today?” and like “What makes you smile about your city?” it’s a challenging one. How do you pin Joburg down to a single mood? On a single day?

Which day do you choose anyway?

Monday, with its bleary-eyed, irritable commuters clinging to the last vestiges of the weekend past, its skinner sessions and slow re-immersion into the world of emails and spreadsheets?
Tuesday, when we finally have to get down to work? (Tequila Tuesday, some call it.)
Wednesday, otherwise known as “Hump day”?
Phuza Thursday, where the prospect of the weekend beckons?
Or Friday, perhaps the happiest day of the week as it brings with it the promise of sleeping in and hanging out with friends?
Then there’s Saturday, with frazzled expeditions to malls, chilled afternoons around the braai and glamorous evenings at restaurants and clubs. And, finally, Sunday, with outings to the Zoo, and the ineffable sadness of Sunday afternoons, as the dove coos “Work harder, work harder”.

A city has many moods, sunny and dark, restive and relaxed. I’ve found that art offers an easier way to express the coiled, simmering energy of Joburg. This painting, which I completed over a couple of weekends, alludes to the city’s restlessness, its continuous movement as well as its brooding undercurrents. Its materialism and shallowness, its still-beating heart. (As I’ve mentioned before, all of the paintings for this campaign — this is the third in a series of twelve — are in pink, because that is the colour assigned to Joburg. Which is a very good thing for somebody who paints with lipstick.)

Into the colour — all of it is lipstick from various sources; I bought the black from a shop in Newtown in Sydney and I’m very pleased with the purply-browny red I found in Clicks — I’ve inscribed words like “angry”, “tense”, “frustrated”. Also “excited”, “optimistic” and “energetic”. Not “content” though — I don’t think that contentment is part of the Joburg psyche. That implies a willingness to sit still, and nobody here ever sits in one place for very long. There are layers upon layers of colour and words and random scratchings, so that it is hard to read what is written. Joburg is not a city which cares much for history; travel around it and you will observe the endless palimpsest of renewal laid over the past.

Thanks to assignments like these, and the needs of clients located in the city, I am starting to engage with Johannesburg in ways I never imagined and would never have bothered with in the past. Like so many in the suburbs, I have preferred to distance myself from it — viewing the forlorn battlements of the CBD much as one might the remnants of Dresden circa 1945 — with the Nelson Mandela bridge representing a psychological barrier as profound as Himalayas.

Now I am having to change my views. It’s quite something for a Sandtonite to pose in the rain under the double-decker section of the M1, or prance about in front of the Diamond Building (a part of town that holds many associations for me — more about that another time). This photograph was taken in the late afternoon, as lightning skittered across the sky and the ground shook with thunder and doef-doef from the impending Red Bull Mobile launch across the park. The sense of energy and freedom were quite wonderful, and it was gratifying to experience it in a place that fills so many of us with angst.

So I’m rediscovering my city. The relationship we have is still a love-hate one, and always will be. But there a nuance to that now, a sense of greater understanding. Layers of meaning that weren’t there before.