To write about William Kentridge’s career is to wonder whether any page can hold it. A true polymath, he has spent more than fifty years working from Johannesburg and travelling the world, speaking through many different artistic mediums. Printmaking, drawing, animation, film, theatre, sculpture, and opera all coexist in his practice, yet at its core lie his signature charcoal drawings and his lifelong urge to record and reorder history – disassembling and reassembling fragments to help us understand it. His major exhibitions span the Royal Academy, Whitechapel Gallery, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Louisiana Museum, and he has appeared at both Documenta and the Venice Biennale multiple times.

Yet despite the scale of his career, the image he offers at the beginning of this interview is modest, almost stage-lit. He sits in his office, at a table, his Labrador curled at his feet. Behind him, the studio lights burn warm; beyond the window, a thunderstorm gathers. In this quiet collision of visuals are the coordinates of his creative life: the storm as future projects peering over the horizon, the studio lights as refuge, the dog as emblem of connection with those around him. His answers – hilarious yet deadpan, self-effacing yet assured – unfold into a masterclass in artistic method, delivered in a gravelly voice alive with restless, relentless imagination.

Shana Chandra: Hi William, how are you?
William Kentridge: I’m well – it’s a Saturday afternoon, I’m in my office at the edge of my studio.

SC: You’re internationally recognised in multiple mediums – combining your love of art, theatre, and film – I was wondering how you’re thinking about your own practice right now.
WK: At the moment it always feels like there are too many different obligations and projects, both in terms of exhibitions, in terms of films, in terms of theatre productions. But I realise I have only myself to blame. The invitations I accept, I always have an interest in and excitement about doing them, so I’m unable to refuse most of them. But when I look at what has to be done and the travelling that has to be done, I think, “Why on earth did I accept quite so many?” It’s a feeling that I’m strapped to the wheel, to keep working non-stop, but as I say, I’ve only myself to blame.

There aren’t enough hours in the day, or enough days in the studio. I do understand that doing things like installing exhibitions, doing the rehearsals for theatre productions, being present for meeting people, doing interviews like this one, are all part of the work of being an artist in the contemporary world, but nonetheless, all of these things feel like not-work. It feels the work is really what happens when I’m inside the studio door, either rehearsing with actors, or making drawings, or filming what I’m drawing. But I realise this is a very fortunate position to be in.

SC: In the TV series that you directed, William Kentridge: Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, we see your drawings fill up with strokes and smudges and then sometimes become undone again, showing us just how dense your work is. I was wondering how you know when it’s time to put an artwork aside?
WK: One of the things about doing the charcoal animation, is that one can work at a great speed all the way through. It’s not as if one suddenly gets more and more anxious about messing up the drawing, or slowing down the work, or working only in details, which might be the case if one is just doing a finished drawing.

When I’m working on a drawing that’s not being used in a film, just a drawing in itself, I try to keep the same principle of working and not slowing down as it reaches a kind of completion. It usually reaches completion just before I think it should. It could need more work, but it’s probably more lively and more present without its completion.

They always say an artist should have someone standing behind them with a hammer to hit them on the head when the work is done, so the artist doesn’t keep going. And often it’s also a question of deadlines and timing. I know that if one works too slowly on a drawing and it’s an animation, the animation will take five years. And some animators do that, but I don’t have that temperament or patience.

SC: There’s an infamous story of you as a young boy of six, creeping into your father’s office one afternoon and spying a box of chocolates in a yellow box. But when you open it, they’re not chocolates but graphic photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre (your father was a lawyer for the case). It’s a hard story to forget, because it’s such a strong moment of a child’s idyllic perception of the world suddenly smashed. You’ve talked about the moment being shocking, and I was wondering how you think it affected you, and if that moment in any way informed your art?
WK: I think at the time, there was a sense of shame at looking at something that I wasn’t meant to see. It was interesting, my father, when we discussed it once, said he’d heard the story about me finding them, and he wanted to apologise to me for having left that box of photographs where a six-year-old could find them. And I didn’t think about it again, but when I made the film Felix in Exile forty years later, after the film was finished,  I suddenly realised that the figures I was drawing – even though they’d been based on police photographs from people who had been killed close to when I was doing those drawings – had echoes back to those Sharpeville photographs.

However, they also had reference back to images of soldiers killed in battle in many of the great frescos and historical cycles of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. But over the years, from that time onwards, there have been many other times when one encounters shocking images for the first time as a child. I think I must’ve been nine or ten when I first saw photos of prisoners being released from Bergen-Belsen, and other Holocaust photographs, which had a similar kind of profoundly reshaping [effect] on how one thinks the world is structured.

And they’re interesting, because I think as one gets older and is inundated with archival footage of different horrors of the 20th century, they get naturalised. One needs to find a child’s shock and outrage at the images and try to rekindle that. To understand what one has lost in growing up and [experiencing] the oversaturation of shocking images.

“They always say an artist should have someone standing behind them with a hammer to hit them on the head when the work is done, so the artist doesn’t keep going.”

SC: You’ve said that with your artistic process you like ‘being open to discovery rather than knowing in advance what you’ll do.’ I was wondering if there has been an artwork of yours where you’ve been surprised by the outcome?
WK: I think that almost all the work I’ve done in which interesting things have emerged, they have emerged not because I’ve thought of them in advance, but [because] I’ve seen them in the work when it’s done – like the trail of smudge in charcoal animation films. At first, I thought this was a mistake, that I couldn’t do a perfect erasure. I tried different papers and erasers, promised my friends I’d do it better in the future, until I was told by someone else – not by me – that in fact the trace and trail of the animation as it’s made was one of [the artwork’s] chief virtues. So, then I had to relook at it and say, “Oh, in fact that’s right.” What I had thought was a mistake was in fact a virtue.

SC: You come from a family of famed lawyers and after wanting to be an elephant at age three, and a conductor at age fifteen, you’ve said you were then ‘reduced’ to being an artist. I was interested in the word ‘reduced’ and why you used it?
WK: When I was growing up, I was always drawing. That’s a baseline just above the ground: there were always drawings happening. I certainly never thought I was going to be an artist; it was just something that I did. And then I had a series of specific aims and goals – like being a conductor, which was impossible; like painting in oil paints, which is what I started as an art student; like becoming an actor when I went to theatre school; like making feature films when I came back from failing as an actor and starting to work in the film industry in South Africa as a production designer, or props man.

And so, when each of those failed, I’d go back to the drawing I was doing in the studio. That was always like the second-best activity. I didn’t feel like it was a real activity; it was a pleasure. I think I was also, to some extent, feeling that one needed a real job, which would get a salary, rather than relying on selling things that you’re just making yourself. I suppose that’s why it felt like a kind of ‘reduction’. Obviously, it’s ironic: I’m very happy that that was what I was ‘reduced’ to. And in fact, now, all the other plans – they’re still there: the filmmaking, the theatre-making, as well as the drawing.

“ I think as one gets older and is inundated with archival footage of different horrors of the 20th century, they get naturalised.”

SC: I was reading your upcoming schedule for next year and I started to get overwhelmed just reading it. How do you keep being so prolific, what do you think fuels you, and what upcoming projects are you most looking forward to?
WK: It is a bit terrifying. Every week we have a studio meeting at nine o’clock on Monday morning, for the ten or twelve of us to gather and see what things are on the horizon, what things are peering over the horizon, what things are heading towards us, what things are right upon us – the sort of panic section – and the sections which are too late to do anything about. Different projects move through these phases, so there’s a general perspective on all the exhibitions and theatre productions, and I have a sense in my head of how much time needs to be set aside for rehearsals, and of trying to get a balance of what’s realistic in terms of new work to do in the next month. The great pleasure is when there are enough days ahead in the studio.

And also, I think what happens is that, perforce, there’s a collision between different projects. A drawing done for one project may well be pressed into service in the next. At first, I thought this was a kind of cheating – to use the same drawing in two different things; now I understand it’s one of the main energies of different projects. Things that come from the side, at a right angle to the central core of the project, suddenly give a different illumination. So the overabundance, the excess of making, is also part of the energy of making. It’s not that, if there were a lot less to do, or if there wasn’t the same pressure of making, the work would be better. I think it’s the very pressure of different things that have to be done that pushes new images into the foreground.

“I keep on thinking at some point I’ll switch to a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, but it hasn’t yet happened.”

SC: There’s a signature to all your work, but there’s also a signature to the way you dress – the white shirt and black pants you wear – and of course, the trademark of the ubiquitous coffee pot. I was wondering if there was more meaning to these signatures, rather than them just being aesthetics that you prefer?
WK: I did ask the brilliant costume designer that I’ve worked with for many years, Greta Goiris, to dress me. I said, “Come on, come on, you make such wonderful clothes, and you give everybody such wonderful colourful things to wear in the productions, won’t you take me shopping, won’t you tell me what I should wear.” And she just looked me up and down and said, “No, I think this white shirt and black trousers is satisfactory.” And so, I’ve kind of been stuck there.

Also, by now, in something like a lecture, for example, there are often films from ten years ago, which I might be referring to. And it helps that the person dressed ten years ago, still looks – in their clothes at least – like I look now. They have an element of performance in them, the lectures, and the relationship to the projections behind them. It is a uniform that makes working and travel very easy, but it does also have an echo to the long-term trajectory of some of the films, and things like the coffee pot project. I keep on thinking at some point I’ll switch to a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, but it hasn’t yet happened.

SC: Do you remember the first artwork you were proud of, and what made you proud of it?
WK: Yes, I think I was five or six years old, and I did a painting, an abstract gouache, just splotches of and flicks of colour. It was fine; a sort of five-year-old Jackson Pollock. But the response of people around me, my parents, aunts and uncles, and other people. At that stage, there was a family magazine that a cousin of mine made, and they put a picture of this in the magazine. My parents got the picture framed and it was on the wall. I was caught between being proud of what I’d done, but also proud because of other people’s responses to it. I was also thinking “What the hell is the fuss about? That was easy, that was just splash, splash, splash.” I was both proud and weary of people’s response to that drawing. For years it was hung in the house, and in many subsequent years, I’ve gone hunting for it. I live in the house that I grew up in, and I keep thinking that in some cupboard in this house, I’ll come across it or find it in my parents’ house in London. But so far, to no avail. I’d be curious to see it now, to see what it actually looked like.

Since then, there have been [other] pictures that [I’ve been proud of]. Going to someone’s house, you see some of my work hanging. Sometimes you think, “Oh my god, how can they let that sit there, it looks so terrible,” and sometimes you think, “Oh, the person who did that knew what they were doing.”

SC: You’ve said before that there’s a book of collected plays by [Vladmir] Mayakovsky that you love going back to year after year due to its wildness of imagination. What’s your prescription to develop a wild imagination?
WK: I don’t have a prescription for how one finds it, but there was something in those Mayakovski plays in the way a city could come alive. The idea that you could run your whole electricity system from the static electricity garnered from stroking black cats and catching the sparks that fly off their dark fur – the absurdity of running a city off the fur of black cats. Those sorts of jumps in scale are kind of wonderful. I suppose the Max Ernst cut-up engravings, putting different objects together in his collage books, give you a sense of the leaps that can be made. I always feel that I’m stuck with a very limited range of transformations and transformational ideas.

But I’m interested in what happens when you smash different things together: archival footage with the burlesque of Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu, and suddenly you see that the burlesque and exaggeration of Ubu can give a new life to the way one sees quite sober archival material. Or what happens when you have a paper cut-out puppet put together with different kinds of music, using the Pepper’s Ghost technique. But it’s not automatic that wild imagination comes to me, certainly. It’s quite a dull imagination, I actually think, and I need to find strategies or dislocations to try to let surprises emerge. Which is why it’s important to give the image the benefit of the doubt – not to assess something before it is made, in the hope that what emerges on the paper, or what emerges from the cut-out, or from the two pieces being thrown together, is a surprise.