Celebrating Inspirations
by
Willem Truter
3 November 2023
Willem Truter was born in Durban in 1951 and matriculated in 1968 in Port Elizabeth. After military service in 1969, he enrolled for the BA (Fine Arts) at the University of Pretoria. After graduation in 1973, he obtained the Higher Education Diploma at the end of 1974.
During his two final years at UP he received a strong grounding in realism as well as abstract art. He became familiar with the work of the American Abstract Expressionist movement and especially two of its main exponents, Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell. This resulted in the latter years in a mixture of a lesser to high degree of figurative and abstract elements. Currently he keenly observes the work of Adrian Ghenie and Albert Oehlen.
From 1975 to the present he was and is professionally involved in various disciplines of art. He taught for several years, was involved in magazine and book layout, book and commercial illustrations in various styles, and graphic design.
He worked for Republican Press in Durban, and in Johannesburg for Perskor and advertising agency Hyams Mortimer Tiley. He also worked for SABC television in the News Graphics department.
Illustration involvement in a children's factual book on birds for Daan Retief Publishers, Pretoria, and a cover design for a book on the Anglo-Boer War stimulated a great interest in both topics till today. He is well read and informed on the Anglo-Boer War years.
Truter has had many solo and group exhibitions in Gauteng. In Johannesburg, amongst others, he had a solo and a three person exhibition with the Visual Art Foundation in Melville in 1994 and 1995 respectively.
His first solo with the Association of Arts, Pretoria was in 2003.
Truter's work for this exhibition is done in reaction to the principal inspirations in his current creative consciousness - Birds, the Anglo-Boer War, Faces. Photos taken during the entire span of the Anglo-Boer War fascinate him greatly and he has an aesthetical need to manipulate personal interpretations of it on paper to make new visual statements.
He takes birds out of their natural context and incorporates them into another.
He uses everything he placed on paper initially as his starting point. Manipulation then starts and figurative images are changed and intermingled with elements from his daily creative involvement - abstract forms and impulsive strokes and marks. His work thus moves from delicately realistic passages through expressionism to abstraction and mark making.
His media is charcoal and colour pastel on paper and his work explores themes of isolation, group consciousness, and fantasy. Most of the work is surrounded by open spaces, inviting onlooker reactionary involvement.
Thank you
for joining us,
we hope you
enjoyed
the work!
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