Paul Du Toit: A Painter’s Journey – Kevan Martin

Paul du Toit was born in 1922, the son of a Huguenot-Afrikaner missionary ministering to a ‘coloured’ rural community near Cape Town, South Africa. At the age of 22 he became a studio-apprentice of Jean Welz, an Austrian emigre who became a powerful influence in South African art. Unlike Welz, whose oeuvre consisted of still life, figure, and portrait paintings, the African landscape was Paul du Toit’s leitmotif. Until his death in 1986, Paul du Toit explored the structural and functional basis of landscape in paintings and drawings. These works reveal a series of conceptual advances that were usually closely followed by a change in studio location, e.g. to Paris in the late 1950’s or to London in the early 1970’s. In what turned out to be his last period, he created a series of abstract paintings, ‘hymns of praise’ he called them, which reveal his faith in the unity of the physical and spiritual worlds. Viewed as a whole his oeuvre shows a single mind attempting to come to some understanding of the forces and structures that shape the physical world in which he lived.

Price: R600.00

Edition: First Edition

Published: 2004

Publishers: Fernwood Press

ISBN: 1874950768 / 9781874950769

Condition: Dust jacket and hardcover in very good condition with very minor shelf wear around the edges and top and bottom of the spine. Pages are clean and tightly bound.