Life is Like a Dice | Gary Frier captures with both tenderness and truth
There’s a defiance in the eyes of the child in Life’s Like a Dice — a quiet one. A kind of layered awareness that Gary Frier captures with both tenderness and truth.
Mixed Media on card by Gary Frier
The artwork, a mixed media portrait on textured paper, fuses collage, drawing, and transparent colour techniques to create an image that feels both constructed and remembered. The child wears a beanie and a slightly oversized jacket, their gaze cast toward something — or someone — beyond the frame. They don’t smile. They know something.
The Medium As Message
Frier works in layers — both visually and conceptually. Underneath the figure lie torn fragments of maps, newspapers, and what appears to be archival ephemera. These are not just visual textures; they are the past surfacing. The collage technique reminds us that every identity is built out of overlapping experiences, histories, and inherited stories.
The linework is sharp in places, soft in others. He uses pencil and possibly pastel or oil sticks to build dimension into the face, while bursts of primary colour — most notably the red flower shape on the chest — anchor the emotional palette.
The background glows in acid yellow-greens and soft aquas, a luminous field that’s equal parts graffiti wall and playground. This isn’t a portrait frozen in time — it’s alive with movement and energy. The paper tears along its edges, and we’re reminded: even resilience can be frayed.
The Dice Metaphor
The title — Life’s Like a Dice — casts a shadow of chance over the entire work.
We read it not just as a personal reflection but as a social one. The child, possibly from a working-class or township context, is rendered with dignity and clarity — but the title suggests their future is still being rolled. Still uncertain. Still dependent on structures that have long been stacked unfairly.
In that sense, Frier is pointing to the lived experiences of many South Africans — particularly children — whose trajectories are shaped not only by grit and intelligence but by geography, class, and access.
The dice becomes a metaphor for opportunity, injustice, and agency — rolled daily.
Seeing Beyond the Surface
This is not just an image of a child. It is a visual essay on potential. A narrative of fragility and force. A portrait of resilience, still forming.
Frier’s strength as an artist lies in how he treats each subject with layered care. There is no sentimentality here — only truth, observation, and love rendered through light, line, and layered material.
Artist Bio
Gary Frier is a Cape Town-based artist known for his emotionally resonant figurative work, often exploring themes of identity, history, and social structure. He works across painting, drawing, printmaking, and ceramics, and is deeply involved in art education and community development.
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