Lucky Sibiya was born in 1942 in Natal, a province in South Africa. His farther was a Sangoma, a Zulu healer using traditional spiritual objects and ceremonies in healing practices. Sibiya started making art from a young age developing his own style of calabash engraving. In the mid 60s he met the artists Bill Ainslee and Cecil Skotnes in Johannesburg. Skotnes, who at the time was the leading artist in South Africa and head of the Polly Street Art centre, took Sibiya on a as a private student and introduced him to his technique of cutting and pigmenting large scale wooden panels. Sibiya fused this with his own calabash engraving technique creating a unique visual language. Rubbing powdered pigments into engraved images and gradually developing this developed more and more into carving. Creating his signature images with organic shapes, fluid lines and contrasting colour planes.  Inspired by his father’s Sangoma practices Sibiya focussed more and more on depicting rural African symbolic scenes of tribal traditions and rites of passages.

In our panel we can see a Zulu couple side by side in  front of a landscape in browns, ochre and red. A Blue sky stretches above the horizon. The man on the left of the panel has his arms outstretched to the sky almost as in celebration. We could be looking at a wedding ceremony although their relatively modest attire suggest otherwise. They are both adorned with necklaces of some sort and wrapped around the ancles are what could be beaded strings. The both  seem to be waring some sort of headpiece and the man has a cloth wrapped around his waist.  Sibiya’s technique of engraving and carving is clearly visible in the tool marks left visible where the wood has been scraped or chipped aways. The coloured pigments seem to have been rubbed into the wood creating a layered  effect.  On either side of the panel we can see a bird. The Zulu people and many other African tribes, believe that birds were the bringer of fertility and the highest state of perfection and form of life.