The Hermanus FynArts Festival Friday 10 – Sunday 19 June 2016

The Hermanus FynArts Festival
Friday 10 – Sunday 19 June 2016
A combination of Arts Festival and Winter School, the Hermanus FynArts festival has a focus on the visual arts and includes over twenty exhibitions, as well as eighteen concerts, several gourmet dinners, talks, panel discussions, workshops, classic movies, chefs’ demonstrations and a series of tutored wine tastings. You can even win one of six gorgeous wine prizes by choosing your favourite wine labels as you savour the fruits of the vine. And, artists still have time until 20 May to enter for the Tollman Bouchard Finlayson Art Award.

Louis Jansen van Vuuren, well known artist and educator, who now lives in France, is the 2016 Festival Artist. His exhibition will be at THE SPACE art gallery. He has also created the unique wine label for the inaugural FynArts wine. Louis will hold two painting workshops (already sold out) and a demo Art in the Round which will be an educational painting performance. Seats are still available for this demonstration on Saturday 11. A poet as well as a painter, Louis will celebrate the launch of his new collection of Afrikaans, English and French poems at an intimate house concert, ‘Into the Blue’. Niël Rademan, acclaimed singer of cabaret as well as classical music, will perform a number of the poems that have been set to music.

The Ralph Walton jewellery workshop is also sold out but a number of other workshops still have tickets available: Carl Becker – sketching and drawing; Tania Babb and Rae Goosen – ceramics; Maureen Tomaino – watercolours; Leanne Dryburgh and Peter Hassall – photography; Renee Gerstner – working with reclaimed wood; Anne Marie Bezdrob – creative writing, Karin Schimke – poetry; Annie Sloan – decorative paint techniques; and Monique Day Wilde, colouring-in techniques.

The series of Stephan Welz FynArts Talks includes actor and playwright John Kani (The role of the arts in South Africa); Marilyn Martin with a series of two lectures (Paris 1863 – 1874: The decade that astounded and divided a nation); Adi Cloete (A journey through jewellery); Michael Godby (Domestic Interiors in South African Collections); Titia Ballot (The fine art of print making) and Warren Siebrits, who will talk about Walter Whall Battiss at the Walker Bay Gallery which will host an exhibition of works by Battiss and Norman Catherine.

Fourteen participating art galleries in the centre of Hermanus present special exhibitions. Festival goers can take a leisurely art ramble from one to the other, as well as to exhibitions at the Windsor Hotel (ceramics); Marine Hotel (jewellery); Old Synagogue (Art of Thread); Municipal Auditorium (Keiskamma Art Project tapestries) and the new Sculpture on the Cliffs exhibition. Further exhibitions will be found at the Hemel-en-Aarde Village, at participating wine farms along the Hermanus Wine route and at Benguela Cove Wine Estate and in Onrus.

Local hotels, guest houses and B&Bs are offering special rates during the festival so, although it’s just an hour-and-a-half drive from Cape Town, how much better to stay for a few days and sample some of the art exhibitions and the rest of the packed programme of events on offer.

You can enquire, book, pay and print your tickets for every event by simply visiting the website 2019.hermanusfynarts.co.za.
Enjoy the experience…