When I look back across my fifty-year career, it feels less like a conventional artistic trajectory and more like a focused, decades-long mission. My path was not about chasing global trends for their own sake, but about finding a language—a meticulous, realistic language—to document and preserve the fleeting architectural soul of my own country, especially the small towns of the Western Cape and the evocative Karoo.

My story begins in Worcester, where I was born in 1946. It was a "Goldilocks town"—"not too big, not too small,” but rich with latent artistic sparks, nurtured by my uncle Theo, an aspiring painter whose room was a trove of brushes and paint. Worcester already had a quiet artistic heritage, connected to figures like Hugo Naudé and Jean Welz. My early art education continued under Hannes Koorzen and Bokkie Basson at the Hugo Naudé Art Centre, a man who, working in an abstract style, was a gentle rebel. This atmosphere of looking locally while questioning the established norms was the perfect groundwork for what was to come.

In 1966, I enrolled at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town. The institution had thankfully moved away from the authoritarian classical training that demanded endless hours drawing plaster casts. That rigid, past-oriented regime was synonymous with the dominant South African formal landscape painting. Masters like Pierneef had idealized and monumentalized the landscape, making it grand, and this tradition even dictated the use of the standard landscape format, adhering to the golden mean ratio of $1.618 for ideal proportion. To deviate was considered chaos. My later signature use of the square format was therefore not merely a choice; it was a direct, radical rejection of a sacred South African art tradition.

Despite rejecting the local old guard, I was, like my peers, compelled to look overseas. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, New York City had replaced Europe as the epicenter of artistic leadership. I was absorbing two distinct, crucial strands from that scene. The first was Pop Art, which validated commercial, low-status items—things like corporate advertising and storefronts—as worthy of high art. The second was the technique itself, which was channeled to us locally by Neville Dubow, a prominent critic and teacher at Michaelis.

I initially experimented wildly, even attempting a series of space paintings, trying to find my voice in this torrent of modernity. Dubow, having supplied the menu of modern possibilities, then gave me the single most powerful piece of advice—the compass point for my entire career. He said, “Instead of constantly looking to New York for your subject, you should explore the world around us and comment on the things we were familiar with.” This elegant mandate urged me to absorb sophisticated international techniques but apply them to my own ultra-local, ephemeral reality.

With my subject compass set, I needed the perfect tool for exploration, which arrived in the form of Hyper Realism or Photo Realism. This approach was revolutionary: the painting becomes a depiction of a photograph of nature, not a mirror of nature itself. At the time, working from a photograph was a technical taboo, as it supposedly undercut traditional drawing skill. However, I already had a deeply ingrained photography habit, driven by necessity and the urgent desire to record the shops and buildings in Worcester before they disappeared. I was, in effect, documenting history.

Around 1972, everything clicked. Dubow's suggestion—explore what is familiar and vanishing—met my personal archive of photographs of these fleeting buildings. This archive became my search for the real South Africa. I took a simple photograph of a mundane, ordinary corner store and executed a photorealistic painting from it. The validation was immediate: the small piece was submitted to the prestigious New Signatures exhibition and selected as a prize winner. The clinical depiction of a corner shop shattered expectations. It was representational, yes, but it was not the idealized landscape of the old guard; it was gritty, commercial, and done with a detached, contemporary technique.

I never denied the international influence, explicitly naming Photo Realists like Richard Estes and Chuck Close. My achievement was taking their approach to the mundane and their use of photography, and evolving it—applying that core idea of finding high art in low-status commercial architecture right here in South Africa. My specific subject choice, the corner store, the bioscope, and the general dealer, was driven by their unique, quirky character and the fact that other artists simply hadn't touched them. I loved their human sense of scale—they were not towering monuments. I even found abstract visual interest in the corrugated iron roofs and the patterns they created. Since the buildings themselves were often architecturally bland, their color and personality came from the commerce—the signs. I actively sought out the iconic advertising, the bold reds and blues of Coca-Cola or the crudely painted images of food, which provided a vital pop of color and told a powerful story of local commerce and survival.

Returning to my deliberate aesthetic, the rejection of the golden mean and the adoption of the square format (notably in my All Square exhibition in 2023) was key. The square is inherently unnatural for landscape, marking a direct break from classical rules. It forces me to look at buildings head-on, eliminating distracting peripheral elements like the sky or trees. This concentrates the image, allowing me to focus purely on the abstract shapes, the color relationships, and the lettering. The viewer's gaze is focused entirely on the architecture, almost like a clinical specimen.

This clinical approach is linked to my objectivity, which is manifest in my deliberate exclusion of people from my work. I want the buildings themselves to be “the portrait”. Including figures changes the scene’s dynamic, introducing a specific story and a moment in time that I wish to avoid. By leaving people out, the empty verandas and silent shopfronts hint at the lives that have passed through them. The building becomes the sole vessel, allowing the viewer to project their own memories and narratives onto it. This deliberate objectivity is what makes the audience connection so personal, creating instant nostalgia. Most South Africans hold incredibly fond, tactile memories of their local corner café from childhood. My work resonates most strongly when it triggers this instant recognition and sense of ownership, which is why these images often act as windows into a world that is slowly fading for South Africans living abroad.

My artistic methodology was deeply shaped by my dual professional life. Beginning in 1970, I embarked on a distinguished 32-year tenure at the South African Museum, eventually becoming Head of Exhibitions. This institutional commitment instilled a fierce curatorial rigor in my work. My job demanded an obsession with authenticity, preservation integrity, and accurate visual narrative—the exact same standards I applied to my canvas. During this time, I initiated my core artistic mission by methodically photographing small-town structures, explicitly stating that my intent was to “save them from obscurity”. These photographs served as the non-negotiable source material for my paintings, ensuring that my realism was not simply subjective observation, but meticulous, objective documentation. The translation into oil paint then elevated the documentation, allowing me to add texture and permanence, making the scene heavier and more emotionally resonant than the photographic evidence alone.

When I retired from Iziko Museums in 2002, I did so specifically to intensify my focus on painting. This marked the full dedication of my artistic maturity to my primary subject: the South African platteland. My paintings of the Karoo’s simple, unpretentious structures become meditations on survival, silence, and a historical lineage threatened by modernization and neglect. While primarily a chronicler of the rural, my preservationist gaze is also cast upon cityscapes, exemplified by my 2021 show Looking at Long Street and Other City Paintings, demonstrating that I can apply the same archival rigor to documenting the accelerating change in chaotic urban cores.

My professional acceptance is tracked through a staggering five-decade exhibition history. I was validated early on with inclusion in national showcases like the Art South Africa Today (1971, 1973, 1975) and the Cape Town Triennials (1982, 1991), establishing me as a leading voice in South African Realism. My historical significance was sealed in the mid-1990s with my inclusion in the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery. This period also saw international exposure, with my work being shown in the Netherlands (De Kleur van Verandering, 1995) and Belgium (Kunst uit Zuid-Africa, 1996), where my hyperrealistic documentation served as a vital window into the cultural landscape of a nation in democratic transition. Crucially, my commercial independence was secured by an astonishingly consistent commercial viability, evidenced by a nearly two-decade-long run of successful participation in the Art Salon on the Bay (1993-2011), which cemented a loyal market eager for my specific style.

Even in my later years, I continue to evolve. I want the texture and the brushwork to be part of the story, moving beyond a perfect replica of reality to capture the emotional truth of the scene. Solo exhibitions like Vanishing Karoo (2019) and Road Trip (2023) confirm I am still actively traversing the landscape to update my archive. My recent focus on the square format, seen in the All Square show, represents a late-career self-challenge, forcing the absolute balance and precision that perfectly mirrors the rigorous structure of the buildings I portray.

My aim is, and always has been, to create a painting that makes a statement about a specific place that existed at a specific moment in time. I successfully merged the technical demands of academic excellence with the administrative rigor of a museum professional. The result is an enduring legacy where immense technical skill is used not just to create beautiful paintings, but to wage a continuous, living critique against forgetting, freezing fleeting moments of South African history and giving them permanence through paint. The harsh, bright, and incredibly clear light of the Karoo and Western Cape creates sharp, luminous shadows that define the architecture in a way that is unique to this part of the world. Capturing that specific luminosity is essential to grounding the work in South Africa.