Tony Grogan's South African sketchbook

by Tony Grogan

Wherever Tony Grogan goes he takes pencil, paper, water-colours - and his artist's eye for detail. From his rough sketches and pencil scrawled notes he has drawn the material for such successful books as his Settler Country and Vanishing Villages. Now he shares with us a sketchbook that for the first time is a condensation of wanderings through many different parts of South Africa and South West Africa/Namibia. Here are prospectors and miners, fishermen and farm workers, Zulu warriors from a film set, stately Herero women, the exotic crowd at a Hindu festival in Durban. Grogan's city streets are thronged with hawkers and flower sellers, rickshaw drivers and newspaper boys. His people are caught in all their candid life against a richly varied backdrop: domes, gables, skyscrapers, round Nama huts. Occasionally a landscape, unpeopled and majestic, captures his brush. Wherever he is, Grogan notes down the unhurried prose-poems that fill in the outlines he has drawn. As in his sketchbooks, these pieces are reproduced here in his own easy handwriting. The result is one man's personal view - not an encyclopaedia but an anthology, testifying to a wide-ranging love for South Africa's people and places.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. ^1

Tony Grogan is a cartoonist, illustrator and artist living in Cape Town. His work has been published in many South African newspapers, most notably the Cape Times, and abroad. He is an illustrator of note and has illustrated many books including seven of his own.