The Art Lexcia Podcast with Wesley Pepper

Critically acclaimed writer and award-winning poet, Abigail George sits down with visual artist and entrepreneur Wesley Pepper, and talks about mental health awareness and sanity in the arts, the high risk of suicide and suicide ideation, high risk behaviours such as drug addiction and alcoholism amongst artists, family dynamics, the artistic vision of creatives in the African Renaissance, race and racial discrimination, her mother’s support, encouragement and belief in her chosen vocation, growing up in the brutal regime of apartheid, the genetic predisposition of mental illness and alcoholism in her maternal and paternal family and the solitary path of a writer. Abigail speaks of the major influences in her writing, Rainer Maria Rilke, Salinger, Hemingway, Updike, the Russian poets, the poet, Nick Laird, and Petya Dubarova. There is also a frank discussion of the loneliness, despair and social isolation that she experienced in childhood, bullying, and her dysfunctional upbringing, and how it transformed and informed the blueprint of the consciousness of her writing and thinking, and the artist as witness, historian and outsider.