The great South African artist William Kentridge is tearing up pieces of paper at his kitchen table and pushing them around. He’s showing me the process by which he created a group of sculptures for Yorkshire Sculpture Park. “You play with these shapes and then” — he looks up to make sure I’m following — “this one starts to become like a woman leaning forward. It’s about letting yourself be guided by your eyes.”
With a pair of old-fashioned pince-nez reading glasses dangling from his white button-up shirt, Kentridge combines the reassuring patience of a school art teacher with the dazzling intellect of an eminent philosophy professor. One moment we’re tearing up paper, the next we’re discussing Plato.
