Portrait Artist Cyril Coetzee - Narrative Magic Realist Paintings by Cyril

Coetzee is not only a portrait painter, though portraits are an important feature of all his work. His imaginative canvases are typically surreal or even sometimes of a Fantastic Realist kind. A Vita award winning exhibition of Coetzee’s paintings, drawings and mixed media works of this kind was held both at the University of South Africa Gallery and subsequently at the Witwatersrand University Gallery in 1991. Coetzee has also painted large scale narrative canvases, notably his 28 square metre canvas, entitled T’Kama Adamastor, which was commissioned by Witwatersrand University for the William Cullen Library, to hang alongside similar narrative paintings by J.H. Amschewitz and C. Gill. A major publication about Coetzee’s T’Kama- Adamastor, following the unveiling of the work by Judge Richard Goldstone in 1998, includes scholarly essays by various contributors including André Brink, Dan Wiley and Malvern Van Wyk Smith: “T’Kama- Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting”. Published by the University of the Witwatersrand (2000), edited by Ivan Vladislavić.

Columbine

The Marriage of Rama and Sita

Couple in an Interior - Rhodes University Collection

The Dream of Xavier Pené

The Orientalists

Three Aspirants with a Head of Buddha

Children of the Sun - an alchemical group portrait

Threnody - Etching carried out at David Krut

Fat Tuesday

Niombo - Johannesburg Art Gallery Collection

Revelations - University of South Africa

Ship of Fools - Durban Art Gallery

Tears of Camoes

Tears of Camoes Burial

Tears of Camoes Niombo - Royal Ontario Museum

The Ceremony of Innocence - SASOL Collection

The Dolorous Wound

Tobias

Zarathustras hat

Map Screen - Painting an inner space

The Enormous Room - Interrogation of the self

William Cullen Library - T'kama Adamastor

In 1995, Cyril Coetzee, the artist, was commissioned to produce a painting for the reading room of the William Cullen library at the University of the Witwatersrand. He chose as his subject the figure of Adamastor, which looms large in South African literature, making its grand entrance into literary history in The Lusiads, the national epic by the Portuguese poet Camões published in 1512. Adamastor appears in canto V of this great poem, when Vasco da Gama and his fleet approach the Cape of Storms on their historic voyage to India. A cloud in the shape of a monstrous being suddenly towers over them.

Professor Stephen Gray has described the Adamastor story as the “root of all subsequent white semiology invented to cope with the African experience”. But, as he comments more wryly, it is also “after all, only a highly decorated way of explaining the largeness of Africa and the roughness of rounding the Cape on a bad night”. This was the ironic tone Coetzee has wielded against the overpowering myth. (T’kama -Adamastor, Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting)

Title: T’kama-Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting.

Editor: Ivan Vladislavić, Published by the University of the Witwatersrand.