Interviewer: At what point in your life did you become really passionate about these two forms of expression?
Lionel: Well I grew up with sculpture because my father is a sculptor and that’s something I’ve been surrounded with since I grew up since I was small and basically it’s something that just evolved. It rubbed off on me and I started doing it, particularly sculpture, and then, later on, I did painting and that became something that I was really interested in because it wasn’t something that I was confronted with every day. It was a new discovery for me to do painting. It just happened; I didn’t really decide to do it.
Interviewer: You said you grew up around sculpture, do you remember the first sculpture you ever made?
Lionel: One of the first ones was a small little face that I hollowed out and I hung it on the wall. For some reason, I always wanted to hang things, and I like painting so I actually made a sculpture that you could hang on the wall. Later on funny enough I made variations of that first piece I made but just in large form and bronzes.
Interviewer: Do you still have it?
Lionel: Actually my cousin has it.
Interviewer: You’ve become really known for depicting women in your art, especially Cape Malay women. Why did you decide to look at the women and explore women through art?
Lionel: Well basically I moved down from Pretoria to Cape Town, I used to paint people from my environment and when I moved down here I started painting my surroundings. That ended up being Cape Malay and because they had this universal idea about them and they’re not really black, they’re not white. They’re this new person created through genetics and I think that was something really interesting and from there just plainly painting people in my surroundings. I took that idea and it became a bigger broader idea of ‘who are we’ and where do we come from genetically and race-wise? It intrigued me, the whole idea of someone being African, European, and Malaysian in one. The concept started evolving into different things.
Interviewer: What did you learn about these women while you were depicting them?
Lionel: I think the interesting thing about these women and the main idea about the women is a little bit mysterious why I only mostly do paint women is because I think that my technique lends itself to having this fragile idea of female combined with this very abstract strong masculine painterly effect. It really works well together and something I want to communicate the whole idea of two pools almost interacting with each other in the paintings. Similar to the sculptures there’s always this communication between the two. The idea of the sculpture being like paint drips pouring down and the bronze sculptures mimic the paintings.
