South African Artists: Paul Stopforth. An essay I wrote for my final year at school - unfortunately pictures are not included.

Paul Stopforth was born in Johannesburg in 1945. At the age of 19, he went to the Johannesburg School of Art and studied there for three years until 1967. His artistic personality was shaped during a period of growing social consciousness in South African art. But whereas his senior colleagues' references to local circumstances were often circumspect and inexplicit, Stopforth voiced the conscience of a younger generation and a new decade. His tone was anguished and accusatory; his …

…deny the perceived normality of cinematic imagery. This is not light flickering on a beaded screen: these images are permanent, inescapable and charged with dark associations. The triptych is usually mounted high on the wall of the South African National Gallery which dramatises its allusions to the omnipresent "Big Brother" of Orwell's 1984. The work becomes the preamble for representing the violence and trauma of South Africa pre-1994 while still trapped in the grip of apartheid.