Born in 1955, Pretoria, South Africa. Lived and educated in Pretoria and Durban, relocated to Cape Town 1995, and later Ra’anana, Israel, then returned to Cape Town, having settled in Paarl in 2018 and currently Perlemoen Bay since 2022, working now 'full time' as a professional artist.
Extract from 2008 interview with American/Israeli journalist D. Rhodes (Ra’anana Israel) :
When was your interest in making art first kindled ?
"I recall at a very early age the family was on vacation. My parents had gone out for the evening and the childminder had fallen asleep. When my parents returned to the apartment they found that I had 'painted' every wall with the contents of my mother's make up bag; so my first ‘painting’ was a 'mural'. My father no doubt was furious (and had to have the entire apartment repainted) but I do recall my mother stoically saying "I think he wants to be an artist". I also have a recollection as a very young child of showing my grandmother a drawing of a farm-yard and her asking me why the sheep were bigger than the farmer and the barn and I replied “you don’t understand perspective (although I could not even pronounce the word correctly) – I was always drawing.
What medium do you have a preference for ?
"I explore all mediums, but drawing I am driven towards with a constant obsession. Actually as a very young child I imagined that all of history and the past was in black and white! The newsreels at the cinema and somehow my impressions of the world during my early youth were in black and white; and I love the drama of greyscale and black & white more than colour, but I do also get passionate about colour when painting.
Do you have any formal training ?
"I was tutored by some accomplished artists and friends of the family during my youth, (attending art classes out of school in Pretoria, and later in Durban under the instruction of Bess Galgut as an example) and I received the Matric Art Prize in High School. My art teacher at High School artist Gem Melville (who taught me how to not just 'look' but to 'see' what I was looking at) has always remained the biggest influence on my attitude to the process of making art. After my school years I dropped out of studying art at University level and changed to studying ‘Jewellery Design & Manufacturing’ for 3 years at the Natal Technikon in Durban. I then became a Jewellery Designer and Gold/Silversmith by trade for many years, and worked in the design and manufacturing of jewellery, as well as in retail and wholesale sales, management positions, a qualified estate agent to ‘earn a living’, and community service, and my art was not a priority for a number of years. As a youngster I had a chance encounter with acclaimed South African artist Professor Walter Battiss whilst we were both riding our bicycles in Pretoria and I proclaimed to him that "I am going to be an artist". His response (accompanied by a warm chuckle) was to tell me to have a career and a job so that I could make 'sincere and freely creative’ art without the pressure of having to survive off selling my art. That somewhat stuck with me into adulthood. I suppose I would call myself semi-self taught. I do not really enjoy talking or verbalizing about any artwork - my feeling is that the picture or image must 'speak for itself’ - an old cliché really – but an artwork has a life and voice of its own, and sometimes the very act of drawing or painting can be a very spiritual experience for me. I like what J. Bronowski says in his book 'The Visionary Eye': "No work of art has been created with such finality that you need to contribute nothing to it. You must recreate the work for yourself. You cannot look at a picture and find it beautiful by merely a passive act of seeing. The eternal relations that make it beautiful to you have to be discovered and in some way have to be put in it by you. The artist provides a skeleton, he provides guiding lines, and he provides enough to engage your interest and to touch you emotionally. But there is no picture unless you yourself enter it and fill it out."
As a child an activity that would bring me much pleasure was to spend time in the Pretoria Art Museum and the Pretoria Museum of Natural History sketching, and later the Durban Natural Science Museum as well as ‘studying’ the art at the Durban Art Gallery. I always enjoyed the company of various 'eccentric' creative adults that I encountered in society and would find them more engaging and visually articulate than my peers. An uncle of mine Neil Sack owned a commercial art gallery in Durban (The Neil Sack Gallery) together with Gordon Lowings (later of the Elizabeth Gordon Gallery) and I would spend many afternoons after school at the gallery absorbed in the art on display and drifting off into another world listening to the beautiful classical and jazz music that was always playing in the background.
As my Hebrew name is Gidon, I work under my English as well as my Hebrew name as I also undertake artwork which would fall under the genre of ‘Judaica Art’.
Dion (Gidon) Futerman