Biography

 

Stef Terblanche has enjoyed a successful career spanning several decades as a visual artist, writer and journalist, among other things. His paintings reflect his intense interest in and love of magical realism, firmly rooted in the diverse heritage of the African continent where his French Huguenot forebear came to settle at the Cape of Good Hope in 1698, a refugee from bloody religious persecution in France. Today, Stef Terblanche still lives and works in the beautiful city of Cape Town at the foot of the iconic Table Mountain. But his love of Africa has also taken him all over the continent and the Indian Ocean islands. 

Terblanche started drawing by the age of 5 and his drawings quickly became a vehicle for his love of storytelling until he learnt to write. From that early point on his visual art and his writing were engaged in a lifelong conflict, the two always competing for his full attention.

Storytelling

He attributes his love of storytelling to the many tales his paternal grandmother told him as a small boy - stories of mythological African animal characters and of the Anglo Boer War that she witnessed from the periphery as a child. And the imaginative games his mother would play with him kindled in him an intense interest in a world where fantasy and reality crossed paths. These influences continue to find expression in Terblanche’s art, in the visual stories that reflect the realm between Africa’s harsh realities and its soulful fiction, and the tension between its kind beauty and its savage cruelty. He engages in a subtle play of both historical and contemporary political and social nuances, infused with the dreamlike qualities of Africa’s natural beauty and the creatures that inhabit it.

Within this paradoxical context he always finds and explores the beauty of things and people and places and feels compelled often to emphasise it as an integral part of the story, even if only as a mechanism to negate the ‘ugly other’. At times unexpected visits are also thrown in of objects, people or influences from other distant places, times or experiences, the universal imperatives that connect all people, places and times.

Training

Although Stef Terblanche had some formal training as an artist, he is mostly self-taught. As a child his art efforts were encouraged by an artistic cousin much older than he, whose gift of a book of Picasso prints unlocked a new world for him. Later, his high school art tuition came from a fiery Scotsman, Mr J McCabe, who taught him never to fear an empty canvas but to attack it with paint, perspective, and ideas. It was during this time that he won his first national art prize in a competition for school children. 

Following his year of compulsory military conscription, his father talked him out of  attending art school as that “would not lead to a proper job”. So instead, given his love of storytelling and writing, and with much encouragement from his father, he became a journalist. He worked for various major South African newspapers and later for magazines, travelling all over Africa and the Indian Ocean islands, and also covering several conflicts as a war correspondent. His political writing also took him into a successful second career as a political analyst. This deep interest in politics is often evident in his paintings, while his journalistic experiences also provided plenty of material for his painting. 

During this period, while studying part-time at university, he continued painting on the side, gaining from the influences and advice that he was exposed to in the circles of artists with whom he engaged. Over the years, his travels to places such as Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Mexico, the United States, Singapore and others also informed much of that which would find expression in his art. 

Eventually, around 1994, his core occupation shifted increasingly from his journalism and politics to painting. His body of work grew rapidly, and his range of skills expanded while he started winning awards and selling his paintings successfully. He was by now battling with the idea of swapping journalism and politics for a full-time art career - a risky decision for a family man raising four sons at the time. Nonetheless, at this point he enrolled at the Ruth Prowse School of Fine Art in Woodstock, Cape Town, studying Advanced Drawing and Painting  under the renowned late artist Erik Laubscher.

In 2001 Terblanche started painting full-time and became a partner in the now defunct Resonance Art Gallery in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront precinct. He also opened his own art gallery and studio on Castle Street in the centre of Cape Town until the building housing it was condemned by the city authorities as being “unsafe”. At this time he also managed a stall in the V&A Waterfront’s Watershed where he exhibited and sold some of his alternative forays into arts and  crafts. While he continued painting, he eventually stopped showing his work in exhibitions, preferring to be represented by online galleries and showing his work only to select potential buyers in his studio then housed on Faure Street, Gardens, next to Cape Town's famous Mount Nelson Hotel. 

Terblanche, however, insists that his most valuable training as an artist came from the countless hours he spent in galleries locally and abroad studying the works of past and present masters, well-known contemporary artists and many lesser-known artists. For instance, to get closer to the art of other painters and the dominant prevailing trends he at one stage volunteered to work for free in the then very fashionable Bell-Roberts Gallery at its old Bree Street premises in Cape Town while simultaneously holding down jobs as an artist, freelance journalist, and political analyst. He has spent many hours in Cape Town's many art galleries and museums studying the works of other artists. And in Los Angeles he spent days walking across the entire greater and vastly stretched-out city visiting its many art galleries from Santa Monica to The Getty, West Hollywood, the LA County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, other city and county art museums, and on to the Arts District, through China Town and Little Tokyo to East LA. He did the same also in places like San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, among others. 

Influences

Terblanche counts among his most enduring influences a number of North and Latin American artists including Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Antonio Berni, and especially the contemporary Cuban artist, Julio Larraz. During a sojourn of several months in the United States with visits to Mexico, Terblanche used the opportunity in both countries to learn more about American and Latin American art and artists. He also counts among his influences the art of painters such as Danish artists Anna Ancher and Wilhelm Hammershoi, the German Christian Schad, as well as various earlier artists and classical masters  and a number of South African and African artists. In recent years he started following closely the emerging body of work of various young African and black American artists, with which much of his own work identifies strongly.

Around 2010, unforeseen personal circumstances temporarily again divided his time and career between painting and journalism. During this time he became the editor of a travel magazine, a position he still holds on a part-time contractual basis. However, since around 2015 he returned to painting with a vengeance, making up for lost time. His temporary absence from being active as a full-time painter allowed him to engage in explorations of the art world that have filled him with new insights, passions, ideas, techniques, directions, experimentation and, above all, new paintings. 

Current

Stef Terblanche has established himself firmly in the magical realist tradition as a painter of landscapes and figure work, with much of his work containing social, political and mythological commentary and undercurrents. Quite often his work displays an element of satire and fun within a slightly surrealist context. Colour, light and an attachment to the "traditional" possibilities offered by paint and the craft of making art are important to him. Also noticeable is the way he often suffuses his paintings with the bright, warm and relentless light and the strong colours unique to his native African continent.

His recent figure paintings – often merged with landscapes in the background and settings that seem to have escaped from a dream - invariably contain figures acting out life’s many dramas. They are frequently charged with mystery, danger, passion, satire, political intrigue and many other fascinating traits or events of human life.

Awards

Merit Prize, National Schools Art Competition 1973

Merit Prize, New Signatures Exhibition, Bellville Arts Association 1996

Merit Prize, New Signatures Exhibition, Bellville Arts Association 1997

Best Work in Oil, New Signatures Exhibition, Bellville Arts Association 1998

Exhibitions

Between 1996 and 2010 Stef Terblanche regularly showed his work in both group and solo exhibitions, including several exhibitions at the Bellville Arts Association, the Association for Visual Arts (annual members' exhibitions), the White Pages Exhibition in Durbanville, the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, South Africa (multidisciplinary/media), annual art exhibitions/auctions at Jan Van Riebeeck Primary in Cape Town, the Gallery on Castle and Resonance Gallery. His work was also showed by various online galleries. In more recent years he stopped showing in  physical group and solo exhibitions, instead preferring to arrange private showings at his studio and being represented by select online galleries. His work is also represented in various private collections and can also be seen on Instagram under 'stefterart' (link below).

Memberships

Association of Visual Arts (Cape Town)

Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA)