PAUL GUY LAVENDER - ARTIST

1937 - 1998

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Lavender was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on 2 March 1937. He was the son of Basil Lavender, who had a fine singing voice and was well known in Port Elizabeth's music and theatrical circles. From an early age the young Lavender showed a talent for drawing and painting and was encouraged by his parents to develop his gift. 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 1981. Muff-Ford was head of the Port Elizabeth Technical College Art School before becoming head of the art department at Grey. At the age of 13 Lavender submitted a work for the annual exhibition of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. The work was accepted, causing something of a furore when the judges discovered that it was the work of a child.

Having won a considerable bursary to further his studies, Lavender became 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. Although he considered the possibility of doing commercial art, Lavender abandoned this idea because he disliked having his work altered or adjusted by others and could not tolerate the notion of working as a "team." In other ways he was perfectly happy to do so, and had been an exceptionally good rugby player while at Grey, and a fine athlete. He enjoyed singing both in small groups and in full choirs and had trained as a chorister under Robert Selley who was Port Elizabeth's director of music and organist and choirmaster at the Collegiate Church of St Mary the Virgin. The result was Lavender could read a tenor part flawlessly and sing an impromptu tenor if the music was not available. He had near perfect pitch, which his family remembers caused him some distress at times because he could not tolerate music which was remotely off pitch.

In 1961 he married Beryl, daughter of Port Elizabeth City Councillor, E L Chaplin. Shortly after their marriage Lavender took up an appointment as Head of the Art Department at Michaelhouse, one of South Africa's best-known boys' private schools. He remained there until his retirement in 1996. His three children, Catherine, Guy and Penelope, and four grandchildren, Michael, Matthew, Amy and James, all live in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of 1997 Lavender retired to Howick, in the Natal Midlands, where he died suddenly 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 where his widow and his children have made their home.

"REMARKABLE TALENT"

When a memorial exhibition of Lavender's work was held in the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg in August - September 2000, the art critic of The Natal Witness, Valerie Maggs, wrote: "Watercolour painting was undoubtedly Lavender's stregth. 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. As a student, Lavender was taught watercolour painting on a basic level but his knowledge must have come from much research on his part. He was also a most skilled oil painter.

"Intelligently, he confined fhis 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 on the Natal midlands. This makes for cohesive and orderly body of works.

"The urban and harbour paintings are remarkable for their accuracy and exactitude of drawing. They are also remakable in their well observed and historically significant recording of places that no longer exist or have changed with time. In these, Lavender has left a valuable body of works that should be kept intact for posterity.

"It is in the midlands landscapes that we see Lavender's poetic aesthetics come to life. In these he tackles the vagaries, the everchanging contrasts that characterise the midlands. He was still meticulous in his approach. This is evident in the virtual library of sketchbooks in which he superbly worked his pencil preliminary drawings, proving the adage that there are no shortcuts to good art. The midlands paintings have many provocative contransts. Not only do they paint a landscape but also include manmade structures that imbue these with life.

These structures are mostly fragile, almost temporary, buildings. Many are trading stores and there is a quality of poverty and hardship about them. (This is not a Mercedes Benz midlands.) In these often stormy, depressive and oppressive landscapes, the impact is on the power of uncontrollable natural elements and their danger to the human structures man has imposed on the land. In these works the mood conveyed transcends straight representation and make them some of Lavender's most powerful works.

"In Lavender's last paintings, the precarious structures give way to more enduring, modest cottages. The dark mood has lifted and these are bathed in an intense light full of flickering colours and brushwork. They are happy paintings, done in his retirement. He followed the traditional British late 19th century approach: paint what you see and paint it well."

HIS WAY WITH WATERCOLOUR

Members of his family have revealed much about Paul Lavender's method of work. Although he painted in several media - oil, gouache, watercolour and acrylic - they are agreed that watercolour is what he most enjoyed. It suited the quick, spontaneous temperament of one who "painted instinctively rather than logically, with an unerring eye and an intuitive understanding." Although he studied art at both school and tertiary level, they believe that in the final analysis Lavender painted with a gut feeling rather than a learned technique. They quote one of Lavender's fellow students who remembered him as one with a "precocious talent" who earned the wrath of lecturers who were trying to "teach" him what he instinctively did his own way.

All Lavender's paintings were based on on-the-spot sketches executed in pencil, carbon pencil, charcoal or watercolour. Then came the "studio" version which always began with a light, barely suggested but very secure drawing on paper, board or canvas. When he began to paint it was invariably to accompaniment of recordings of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, his favourite composers. He was particularly fond of chamber music in the last years of his life. The first colour went into the sky, broad sweeps of it, sometimes wet into wet, sometimes wet onto dry, depending on the effect he wanted. He seldom, if ever, stretched the paper. He liked to work on strong, heavy papers that did not need stretching, like Waterford Rough 638g/m sq. He was also very fond of the Fabriano range of papers. He used only Winsor and Newton select colours and tested them for permanence for weeks on end in South Africa's blazing sunshine.

Part of the challenge which he found in watercolour was the business of "accidentals". He deliberately sought these, painting with overloaded brushes to see what the splashes and drops would produce, twirling the brush and swirling the paint. Usually he reserved this particular brand of spontaneity for the foreground, having painted the "object" - tree, cottage, boulder-strewn hillside or boat - with some care. If the foreground was still "too tame" he would go for accidentals or use a reed pen - which he made himself from bamboo - to add linear effects. Or he would use a very dry brush to produce effects like wheel tracks on a road.

The obviously beautiful never appealed to him a subject matter for a painting. He said he was not in the business of competing with God. Instead he sought the unexpected beaty in the fall of lilght on a gnarled tree, a lined face, a sagging wall or a winding road. He disliked "prettiness" but was seriously moved by atmosphere and by tonal contrast. Born in the windswept seaport town of Port Elizabeth, he always felt most at home when hear the sea - or in it - (he loved swimming in the sea and body-surfing) - and was engrossed by ships or boats. However, the latter part of his life was spent in the Natal Midlands and he developed a feeling of warmth and compassion for the rolling Natal countryside and its peoples. The magnificent series of oil paintings which he completed in the last year of his life, which he spent in retirement in Howick, bear testimony to his delight in the rural simplicity of the area around his riverside home, and also to the quieter, more measured and thoughtful approach to his beloved art of painting.

PAINTINGS AND SKETCHES

Lavender has exhibited on the Royal Society of British Artists' Exhibition, the Hesketh Hubbard Art Exhibition and there are paintings by him in the Tatham Art Gallery, South Africa, the Goodyear Gallery in Akron, Ohio, and in private collections in South Africa, England, Australia and America. His family still possess a large body of his work and are planning an exhibition of these in the United Kingdom in 2010.