Biography

 

I have enjoyed a successful career spanning several decades as a visual artist, journalist, and creative writer among other endeavours. My paintings as well as many of my writings reflect my intense interest in and love of magical realism, firmly rooted in the diverse heritage of the African continent where my French Huguenot forebear, Etienne, came to settle at the Cape of Good Hope in 1698, a refugee from bloody religious persecution in France. My preoccupation with magical realism is also influenced by the Cuban American artist Julio Larraz and by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquesz and Jorge Louis Borges, among others.

Today, I still live and work in the beautiful city of Cape Town at the foot of the iconic Table Mountain where Etienne first landed all those many years ago. But both my work as a journalist and my love of Africa has also taken me all over the continent and the Indian Ocean islands. 

Storytelling

I started drawing by the age of 5 and my drawings quickly became a vehicle for my love of storytelling until I could write. From that early point on my visual art and my writing became engaged in a lifelong conflict, the two always competing for my full attention and preference.

I attribute my love of storytelling to the many tales my paternal grandmother told me 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. It was a love further kindled by the imaginative games my mother would play with me where fantasy and reality frequently crossed paths. This love of storytelling has since also found expression in my paintings.

Training

I am mostly self-taught as an artist. However, my formal training I attribute to a fiery Scotsman, Mr J McCabe, who was my art teacher at Sea Point Boys High School in Cape Town in the early 1970s. He taught me never to fear the canvas but to attack it with passion. At that time, I won my first national art prize in a competition for school children. After school and following my year of compulsory military conscription, my father talked me out of attending art school as that “would not lead to a proper job”. Instead, I became a journalist but continued painting on the side, gaining from the influences and advice that I was exposed to in the circle of artists with whom I engaged, as well as from my travels to places such as Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Mexico, the United States, Singapore, Denmark and more. 

In 1994 I finally started painting on a more regular basis and in 1999 I enrolled for and completed the course in Advanced Drawing & Painting under the late artist Erik Laubscher at the Ruth Prowse School of Fine Art in Cape Town. I also became a partner in an art gallery in Cape Town’s iconic V&A Waterfront and later owned my own art gallery on Castle Street, Cape Town for a few years. Finally, there probably is no better training for an artist than spending many, many hours in art galleries studying the inspirational works of other artists, from the classical masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and the Impressionists to the unknown artists in small-town galleries around the world.

I count among my major influences artists such as the South Africans John Meyer, Keith Alexander and Walter Meyer; the Americans Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Antonio Berni; the Danish artists Anna Ancher and Wilhelm Hammershoi; the German Christian Schad; various Mexican artists including Frida Kahlo; and especially the said contemporary Cuban American artist, Julio Larraz. 

Awards, Exhibitions & Collections

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

Group Exhibition at the Bellville Arts Association, 1996, 1997 and 1998

Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, South Africa (multidisciplinary/media), 1999

Annual art exhibitions/auctions at Jan Van Riebeeck Primary School, Cape Town, 1995 - 1999 

Solo Exhibition, Durbanville, 2000

White Pages Exhibition in Durbanville, 2001

Group Exhibitions at the Association for Visual Arts 2003, 2005

Solo Exhibition the Gallery on Castle, 2004, 2005

Represented online at Saatchi Art

Represented in various private collections in South Africa and abroad

Memberships: Association of Visual Arts (Cape Town); and Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA)

Stopped exhibiting but since arranged private showings in studio or other locations