Gail, a force of nature found in our city’s cemeteries
Meet the local who can be found in cemeteries around Joburg sketching everything she sees.
The cemetery, a place where one can find loved ones laid to rest, and the surprising presence of those such as Gail Wilson, a sketch artist who travels to various cemeteries sketching features she finds interesting.
Spotted unassumingly sitting among the headstones of Brixton Cemetery, it was not only her striking pink hair that caught one’s attention, but the intrigue behind what she was doing that compelled one to stop and find out.
Gail shared how she had accompanied fellow volunteers of Friends of Johannesburg Cemeteries who had gathered there to rejuvenate headstones with a wash and tidying up gravesites. Finding that she lacked the energy required to be of this sort of service, the artist opted to contribute in her own unique way.
Sketching at cemeteries makes her feel very relaxed and she wished more people would visit them. “It’s so chilled, quiet and peaceful and it is inspiring,” she said.
Though she has always loved art she hasn’t always solely invested her time to it. “I worked in corporate for many years but since I retired, I have started to sketch again.”
She has sat with sketch pad in her lap at cemeteries such as Braamfontein and Westpark. Asked which of these cemeteries she has found more special, she said Braamfontein. This was the place her mother would leave her and her siblings to play with their bicycles for a few hours as they did not have a garden growing up in Hilbrow.
Gail also just recently discovered that her great-great-grandfather is buried at Braamfontein. “All this time my family and I had thought he passed from a mining accident in Kimberly and was buried there.”
Of those she has spent time at, she found Westpark Cemetery to be very lively, “It is almost like going to a busy mall on a Saturday, even though it is a place of sadness, there is always a brass band playing at someone’s funeral and you also see candy-floss and ice-cream sellers riding their bicycles and even a few people who picnic there.”
Wilson hoped that people would look past the sadness of cemeteries and see the wealth of history it stored. “These places are so rich with history. I wish people visited these spaces more often – just to come in and use it as a park as it is so abandoned.”
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