Artist Reshada Crouse faces the devil – and finds her muse

Her encounter with Goya's monstrous Saturn at the Prado sparks a lifelong meditation on art, evil and what it means to create. By Richard Jurgens

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From left: Ashraf Jamal, Reshada Crouse and Rian Malan at the book launch at Everard Reid in Johannesburg on 29 October.

(Supplied)

Reshada Crouse's bravura account of her life and work begins with an encounter with the devil, as she frames it. The occasion is a visit to the Prado in Madrid. As an art student, she tells us, her encounter with European art history was mainly one of puzzlement.

Her teachers' admiration for the art of distant centuries looked like a hegemonic conspiracy — the undeclared, insider principles of a “snobbish, esoteric club”.

Pursuing a journey of discovery in the museums of Europe, though, her encounters with some artworks are moments of revelation. The living paintings that she knew only through reproductions in books turn out to possess vital lives of their own. It can be a blessing “to gaze upon such celestial beauty”.

One painting in particular, Goya's Saturn Devouring his Children, attracts her attention. It is a famously gruesome depiction of the classical myth telling the story of old Father Time preventing his usurpation.

As an earnest aspiring artist, she smells “the stench of evil for the first time”, both in the violence of the subject, which she sees as man's “propensity for evil” in dealing with evil, and in “the static silence” of colours arranged on a canvas to represent it.