User:Tucksy/sandbox

Paul Guy Lavender (born 2 March 1937 and died 30 March 1998) was a South African fine artist, working mainly in oils and watercolour.

Life and career Paul Guy Lavender was a South African artist, born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, who from an early age showed a talent for drawing and painting. As a schoolboy at Grey High School, he studied art under John Muff-Ford, a British-born watercolourist who lived and worked in Port Elizabeth until his death in 1998. Muff-Ford was head of the Port Elizabeth Technical College Art School before becoming head of the Art Department at Grey High School.

At the age of 13 he submitted a work for the annual exhibition of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. The work was accepted, causing surprise when it was discovered that it was the work of a child. He won a bursary to further his studies, becoming a student at the Port Elizabeth Technical College Art School. Among his lecturers were Joan Wright, Jane Heath, John Hooper, Stanley Field and David Brink.

Shortly after his marriage in 1961 to Beryl Chaplin, he took up an appointment as Head of the Art Department at Michaelhouse, a boys' private schools in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa. There he and his wife brought up a family of three children, Catherine, Guy and Penelope. He remained Head of the Art Department until his retirement in 1996. His prolific output of work continued throughout this period and for the remainder of his life.

At the beginning of 1997 he retired to Howick, in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where he died on 30 March 1998. He was originally buried in Howick but his remains were exhumed and cremated in January 2007 and were re-interred in the churchyard in Olney in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom, where his widow and his children have made their home.

A memorial exhibition of his work was held in the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg between August and September 2000, and the art critic of The Witness (formerly The Natal Witness) Valerie Maggs, wrote upon viewing the exhibition: "Watercolour painting was undoubtedly Lavender's strength. He was a master of this difficult, often treacherous medium. He washed his papers with dexterous virtuosity, a conductor of many variations and intricacies of this complex medium".

He confined his imagery to three specific themes: townscapes of his hometown Port Elizabeth, docks, ships and seascapes of the harbours of Port Elizabeth and Durban, and landscapes of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. This makes for cohesive and orderly body of works. The urban and harbour paintings display an exactitude of drawing and detailed observation which are a historically significant record of places that no longer exist or have changed with time.

It is in the Midlands landscapes of KwaZulu-Natal that his poetic aesthetics are revealed. In these works he captures the ever-changing contrasts in sky and landscape that characterise the midlands. He produced a large volume of sketchbooks containing on the spot drawings in which he worked his pencil and charcoal preliminary sketches. He sometimes used photography but preferred the visceral response of capturing the landscape at a particular moment in drawing.

His technique was varied and spontaneous: sometimes wet into wet and sometimes wet on dry, depending on the effect he wanted to achieve. He did not stretch his paper preferring to work on strong, heavy papers that would take this manner of working such as Waterford Rough 638g/m sq. and the Fabriano range of papers. He used only Winsor and Newton select colours due to their permanence.

Notably in his works, was his empathy with those who suffered hardship and oppression and his unsentimental depiction of the people and landscape. The obviously beautiful never appealed to him as subject matter for a painting, instead, the unexpected beauty in the fall of light on a gnarled tree, a lined face, a sagging wall or a winding road moved him. Many of the paintings are of trading stores in which he captures the poverty and hardship. A common theme is an oppressive and stormy landscape and the uncontrollable elements of nature which threaten the humans and the human structures man has imposed on the land. These paintings transcend literal depiction making them some of his most compelling and powerful works.

In his later works, more enduring, modest cottages appear and the dark mood has lifted and intense light full of flickering colours and brushwork energise his work. These are happy paintings completed in his retirement.

He has exhibited on the Royal Society of British Artists' Exhibition, the Hesketh Hubbard Art Exhibition and there are permanently exhibited paintings by him in the Tatham Art Gallery, South Africa and the Goodyear Gallery in Akron, Ohio. Many other paintings are in private collections in South Africa, England, Australia and America and his family still possess a large body of his work in the United Kingdom.