17th May, 1978 

This morning I am going to talk about the paintings that I have done over the last ten years. This is the period since leaving Art School in 1968. Through this talk and a series of colour slides I hope to trace my attitudes and ideas showing what interested and influenced me in my work. In fact, it was by looking through my collection of colour slides of my paintings, people I knew and events I recorded that I became aware of certain trends, which for the purpose of this talk I will refer to as phases - although at the time I was not aware that they were phases as such.

These phases can be broken up as follows: first a rather erratic phase of experimentation and finding myself; then a phase which reflected the space race and man on the moon - I'll call this a space age influence. Next is a phase in which I started making increasing use of photographs in my work and finally after returning from a trip to Europe an awareness of the local scenery and an attempt to get a feeling of something South African in my work, especially that of the Western Cape. The first phase, that of experimentation, started at the point when I finished the formal aspect of art training at the Michaelis Art School in 1968 and I was plunged into the ‘real world. Of course, this was what I had been preparing for but the shock of finding that I now had to start supporting myself slowly altered my perspective on life. No more the guiding hand of the teacher or the seclusion of the school. I was on my own.

All I wanted to do was paint, yet all the time the ideas and methods of teachers which I had learnt at Art School seemed to be intruding. Not that they weren't valid, yet I was frustrated with my work and wanted to do something fresh and new.

All I was doing was repeating what I had learnt. Nothing significant was coming out. It's at this point that I had to re-learn to paint what was good for me, to work out my own ideas about painting and try to discover who the real me was. A period of experimentation began. How did I want to paint, What did I want to paint? Here was a freedom and this sometimes is the hardest to master because it knows no bounds and can lead to confusion. All I could do was paint and be true to myself. Very little survives from this phase, most work was painted over or reused. Some works were destroyed in one way or another. I tried many different styles and subject matter, landscapes, portrait work, abstract, some things I called nightscapes. I experimented with photography and did a lot of collage work using material out of magazines. I seemed to have a lot of fun but didn’t appear to finish anything before going on to something else. This must have bothered me because my work then became tighter and more formal.

It is then that I move into a phase which seems to have been influenced by the space race. That was a remarkable time. It seemed that man was capable of doing anything, and did. It was the age of computers and technology. In 1969 man landed on the moon and left his footprints. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were the first human beings to have stepped onto another world. This was exciting stuff and it had a strong influence on me. Here I was sharing part of all this history in the making. I still remember waking up at about 3 a.m. and listening to the Voice of America broadcast on the radio.

My paintings of that time reflected this concern for technology. I started using more controlled techniques. My work became harder, more metallic. I used acrylic paints and created straight edges with masking tape and the ruling pen. Silver and deep blacks made their appearance. Because of the availability of space images, shots of the moon, man floating in space, views of the earth from satellites and film images like "2001 - a Space Odyssey”, I became directly influenced by photographs in magazines and began working from two dimensional collages made from pasting bits and pieces together. I gave my paintings names like Ugus, Ectivo and Boötes; Boötes being the name of a constellation in the northern hemisphere.

It's this influence of photographic images that began to interest me more and more. I now enter a phase where I start working directly from photographs. Sometimes the same image was repeated over and over almost in a pattern. The object of the exercise was not simply to copy the photograph, but to explore qualities inherent in the photograph itself, things that were not possible in nature like the phenomena of over and under-exposure, and in and out. of focus. The nature of tone and colour in photos and how this could be manipulated.

It is at this point that I would like to say a word about what artists in America like Malcolm Merely, Chuck Close, Richard Estes and John Clem Clarke were exploring at this time. I quote from "Art Since Pop" by John Walker. "Most photo-realists use photographs as an impersonal source of visual imagery. Because their attitude to subject content is neutral, they prefer reportage photographs of banal motifs; urban landscapes, automobiles, shop fronts, horses and faces. Clarke and Morley also revamp coloured reproductions of old masterpieces. The photographs are meticulously copied in acrylic paint; the prefixes 'super', 'hyper' 'radical' and 'super focus' have been applied to this realism because of its extreme verisimilitude and thoroughness of technique. Often the scale of photo-realist canvases is monumental, matching that of abstract expressionism; their inflated size and cold mechanical finish endows them with a disturbing quality which recalls surrealist painting. Photo-realists are not interested in photographic realism in the sense that realist painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Alex Colville seek to emulate the detailed accuracy of camera vision. To them photographs are simply flat images for use on flat planes.

"What intrigues the photo-realists is the technical problems of rendering tones across a surface and capturing highlights and reflection. They treat all parts of the image impartially: Morley turns his photographs sideways to negate their subject matter and also cuts them into small squares for transposing to canvas. Therefore photorealism is in some respects more akin to formalist abstraction than to the tradition of realist painting" Now you might ask what this has to do with me. By 1973 I was caught up in what was called super realism or photo realism and I started a series of large 6’ x 5' canvasses. These were based on photographs that I had taken and had to have a strong local flavour. I wanted my paintings to look like huge blowups of Kodak instamatic prints. The happy snapshot. I was interested in the posed group, the cheesy smile, and clean primary colours. I included a white border in the painting as if in a print. The paintings had snapshot names like "Instamatic Family Group", "Buck and Barbara", "Mr Wonderful" and "Sea Point Sunbathers". The light was harsh, the sky always a bright blue.

This new interest in groups of people and the local environment led to an increasing search for images which I thought were essentially South African. I started taking more interest in the towns of the Western Cape, I was looking at buildings which I thought expressed the 'real' South Africa, like general dealers, cafes, barber shops and small businesses. It was with this new interest in mind that I went on my first visit overseas to Europe and Britain. Of course, as can be expected I was overwhelmed by all I saw.

 Here was all the great art I had heard about or seen only in books and reproductions " Rubens, Titian, Goya etc. It was almost too much. Apart from the art and great buildings there was also the people, the landscape and the light. All the time I was carefully thinking about what made this different from South Africa. I made notes and took many photographs.

When I returned home after a lot of travelling, I saw the local landscape through new eyes. Everything was fresh, bright -the light harsh. I could not help noticing the empty streets, the lack of people. Houses were spaced far apart and the roads were wide. Buildings seemed scattered about. Everything was vivid -the plants, rock formations, barbed wire fences. The light was intense, bright, full of colour. The shadows were sharp and luminous. At this point I felt I knew what was different and at last could compare what was South African in character and what was European. I now enter a phase with which I am still involved. This is a series of paintings depicting this local feeling I have just mentioned, paintings of buildings of no particular architectural style. Recurring elements are tin roofs, pillars, reflections in windows, cars and advertising signs. I want to paint a certain reality and not to romanticize. I tend to work very flat and avoid brush-marks or heavy paintwork. I build them up using a series of thin washes or glazes and concentrate on exploring the qualities of light and tone values.

Instead of concentrating too heavily on this now, I'd prefer to expand on it in the colour slides that are to follow when I'll give you a visual idea in slides of the phases I have just read. Before I go onto the slides I'd just like to conclude with a quote. This is a passage on another artist's attitude to painting which I copied from an Art International in 1969 and which I still find relevant today. It is by Marcia Hafif and reads: "I am a painter because I like to play. Art is play. It is not work. Work is a job that is difficult to do or done unwillingly for ends outside itself. Art may or may not be difficult. It is done for itself. "Painting is form; it has structure which makes it whole in itself. It has presence; it is concrete, objective, but not an object. Painting is colour; colour exists and beyond that makes space. Painting is illusion. Illusion is a joke because it makes surprises. Surprises are fun; they can be hideous, gay, elegant, shocking.... Painting is human, not programmed or mechanical, "Painting does not tell stories: it does not have a use. Art swings because it does not have a purpose. It is not interior decoration or urban decoration or museum decoration. It is personal and private. You can keep it in drawers or fields or in garages. It is for everyone. Painting is playing games”.