Cracking the art-scene in South Africa is hard. Our government is too busy buying themselves new fancy cars and slapping themselves on the back to spend any of their precious time on the arts. So, unlike in any other developing nation (never mind first world nations) artists need to fight tooth-and-nail for recognition and funding.
This is no easy thing in this culturally deprived society our dear fearless leaders are fostering, and as with so many things the onus is on us to do things ourselves, with our own resources.
So, with this in mind, I would like to encourage you to provide just a little bit of love wherever you can to help support an incredible artists who sneaks past hardly noticed right under your noses.
Retha had one of her cartoons published in a swanky South African online magazine called “Itch“. This is quite an achievement I think and I would like to encourage everyone who knows Retha to go to the website and leave a comment.
This would be a really great way to encourage Retha to carry on doing these really fun cartoons (A little encouragement goes a long way, hey.) as well as encouraging her to carry on creating art.
The page with Retha’s work can be found here. <– Don’t forget to comment.
The entire webcomic can be seen here, and here are all the characters so far.
The Dysfunkt website is still a work in progress as I don’t really get all the free time I need to do the modifications Retha wants. We will get there eventually. (A little encouragement here goes a long way too. 
)
Retha also has two other websites. The first, “Gentle Turbulence“ is her blog where she posts lots of interesting bits of this and that. Recently she published some great photos from the festival we went to near the Tankwa Karoo national park.
The second is “Curious Gentle Breakthrough“ which is Retha’s online portfolio where you can see some of her newer work and a lot of her older work. Again, comments are the best way to show your appreciation for a really talented up-and-coming South African artist. It’s a really difficult industry to crack in South Africa and any young local artists needs all the encouragement she can get.
So, if you have two or five or ten minutes spare I’d like to encourage you to make a comment on any of the pages on these websites, and if you can, send this email or some of the links in it to some of your friends and family who are likely to want to support art in SA and ask them to do the same.
Date: September 28, 2009Tags: art, photos, retha, south africa
