George Msimang's contributions to the Town and Country exhibition were true to style. Msimang is a Durban artist who, from 1969, brought his pen and ink drawings to the African Art Centre. That year he won a prize of $250 for work sent by the Art Centre to a competition organised by the African Studies Centre at the University of California, and the work was published in the African Arts magazine.

Msimang is an artist close to my heart. He is as erratic in his art as he is in his life style, and this affects his work. But he should not be overlooked. He has been a recorder of township life since 1969 - considerably before this expression became known in the 1970s and 1980s as protest art. He is a talented natural draftsman, who moved from charcoal in his early years to mostly pen and ink.

Two of his drawings are in the African Art Centre collection:

The Trumpeter, with George's always humorous approach showing the player with a finger his ear, and The Musician, who plays numerous instruments with spanners doing up the bolts and his foot playing a motor car horn.

I They are a meter wide by a meter and a half high.

t is perhaps the humour in his drawings that has prompted some critics to describe him as a caricaturist or cartoonist. But this does not mean that he does not hit the nail on the head as much as protest artists do. Maybe his subject matter is more bearable for the buyer.

George has perhaps not reached the artistic heights which were promised earlier, owing to the need - largely for financial reasons - to sometimes turn out quantity rather than quality. But he is an artist who will be remembered.

Msimang was awarded an Italian Government scholarship to study at the Academie des Belles Artes in Rome from 1971 to 1972, and again in 1973. He returned to Durban fluent in Italian and for a time worked for South African Television Channel Two, translating Italian films into Zulu.