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Painting by numbers
17 December 2006
Read Sunday Times artice here
Give Richard Scott and Paul du Toit some paint and, hey presto, it’s art.
But, despite their bucket loads of cash and very big signatures, Sean O’Toole is not impressed.
It’s their signatures that give the game away. They’re big. Colossal exercises in personal branding. Of course I exaggerate, but only slightly. Less a discreet sign-off, the signatures of artists Richard Scott and Paul du Toit predominate their art. In fact, they are their art.
But forget for a moment Du Toit’s dyslexic rendering of his first name, or Scott’s embossed rendition of his; forget, indeed, that polite noun “art”. Let me rewind. Du Toit and Scott are two Cape Town painters. Fact. And damn successful at what they do.
Scott, born in England but raised in Kempton Park, made R2.5-million from his art last year. H e projects making R3.2- million this year. Since going professional in 2002 he’ s sold over 2400 paintings.
Jo burg-born Du Toit is as successful if his PlanetPaul Studios, a sleek, modernist building in Hout Bay, is anything to go by.
Three things impress themselves on me as I enter Scott’s studio, a neat, double-storey suburban home in Melkbosstrand.
He lives a stone’s throw from Koeberg. He has two assistants that do most of the slog work on his paintings.
And he has all the awkward grace of a stoned surfer.
Standing in what was once the master bedroom, Scott looking out at a gently rolling Atlantic, I ask about the two assistants. “They prepare the canvases. I come up with the creative work, they fill in the colour and I do the black lines.”
If Scott makes being an artist sound easy, it has been just that: easy. After selling his share in an Internet company he co-founded, Scott decided to try his hand at painting. A regular at the Hout Bay Gallery, he says John Hargitai, the gallery’s owner, encouraged him to pursue his whim.
“He even phoned Paul , asking him about the stuff he used.” An unsuspecting Du Toit, a former software engineer who became a professional artist in 1996, told Hargitai it was Duraplast. This synthetic plaster lends both his and Scott’s paintings their richly textured and gouged impasto surface finish. Says Scott: “So off I went and got some of it.”
He produced five paintings. They all sold quickly, the first for R300 (his work now fetches R3000 to R40000). “I thought something wasn’t right, but painted some more and took them to John. In three weeks he sold 24.”
Both artists’ paintings are characterised by bold graphic line, swathes of colour and distinctive surface texture. But where Du Toit prefers to depict crude human forms in jagged lines, Scott uses a bold architectural line to render lifelike renditions of cats, cars and chicks. The latter carry such descriptive titles as Anyone Seen My Panties, Multiple Orgasm and My Blue Pussy.
“Some people think Richard is poesbefok [obsessed with vaginas], but there is more to him than that,” argues Scott’s dealer, Charl Bezuidenhout.
Standing near Blue Desire, Blue Fire, a sexually explicit painting , Scott is less inclined to defend himself: “That’s what I enjoy, the big pussy and the girls. But I can’t paint them every day — people don’t like vaginas and breasts.”
Scott then mentions Du Toit, whose work is panned as being a decorative rehash of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso’s work.
“It is his own style,” argues Scott. “He is inspired by them.”
This is a moot point. I recently visited a Du Toit exhibition at the University of Johannesburg. “This landmark exhibition celebrates his 10 years as a professional artist and there will be a retrospective in print and film,” read a press notice, its hyperbolic tone arousing suspicion. The show merely confirmed it.
Comprising paintings from 2006 interspersed with sculptures and prints, the kindest concession I can make is that they are cuter than the drawings in Roger Ballen’s recent photograph s. Where Ballen’s world is one of downers and existentialism, Du Toit’s mixes LSD with Prozac, creating a colourful nightmare in which you feel nothing.
A video presentation on the show suggests a further, not entirely unexpected, influence. “I get so much inspiration from children,” Du Toit says. “I often look at how they draw.”
The interview is complemented by a short production in which he becomes part of his art, wrestling unruly lines and ragged figures — until “our hero found himself named king of painting”. But, unlike William Kentridge’s Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, an elegant filmic meditation on his studio process as well as homage to pioneering film director Méliès, Du Toit’s lumbering musing on his creative process had about as much charm as watching Schalk Burger doing ballet.
But that is just opinion . In a text on the wall leading to the exhibition, Du Toit claims he is as bankable as Kentridge. It is a revealing bit of immodesty aimed at smoothing over the critical trashing he has received locally.
The word investment is important though, Scott helpful in defining the extent money defines his and Du Toit’s art. Asked which contemporary artists he likes, Scott singles out Takashi Murakami, a Japanese pop artist who lent a splash of colour to Louis Vuitton’s monogram.
Not surprisingly, the commercial focus underpinning Scott and Du Toit’s sales pitch has set them on a collision course , with Du Toit pissed off at Scott borrowing his technique.
In his self-published monograph, Du Toit says he started experimenting with his impasto technique in 1996, after seeing it in Italy. Not so, claims Scott: “ He copied Robert Slingsby.”
An artist who never really fired after showing early promise, Slingsby exhibited with Du Toit, who is accused of borrowing his mentor’s ideas. Scott has simply emerged as the third member in this peculiarly Cape Town squabble. Du Toit now refuses to greet Scott.
Beyond the gossipy nature of this revelation emerges a key point. Originality is not what defines Du Toit’s or Scott’s art; rather, it is their dogged tactical nous, their pit-bull ambition to succeed.
“The only way to determine your future is to try and create it yourself,” states Du Toit in one of his sales leaflets.
While my visit to Scott’s studio fails to convince me that he deserves a second look by the art establishment (“Who?” asked two Wits art professors), it does clarify something. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” countered John F Kennedy to arguments that his tax cuts would benefit only the rich.
Of course, this depends on whether you believe only boats float to the top on a rising tide.
Not that Scott, who refers to his art as “product”, sees himself as a pedigreed yacht. Not like Du Toit. On a trip to the Venice Biennale last year he met a snooty Italian artist.
“He couldn’t comprehend what I was doing. He said I have no feeling, no faith in my art — it is very commercial. I said, hey, there has to be one of you and one of me.”
Sean O’Toole
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