Dirk Meerkotter: Prominent abstract artist who also had a day job
● Dirk Meerkotter, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 95, was a prominent painter and abstract artist whose best piece of advice came from one of South Africa’s most avant-garde artists, his friend Walter Battiss.
He told Meerkotter to get a job with a regular salary and a decent pension so that he could paint freely without the pressure of having to sell to survive. Meerkotter became a pharmacist and worked eight hours a day until he retired at 55.
While at work he thought about art, art exhibitions and artists, and he sketched ideas. When he got home he went to his studio and started painting, etching or producing ceramics.
He had a prodigious work ethic and showed new works of art every 15 months.
At 28 he had his first solo exhibition at Constantia Gallery in Johannesburg. His talent was immediately recognised and he held another 86 solo exhibitions. One of his last was in Stellenbosch in 2009, by which time his works were fetching upwards of R30 000.
Meerkotter took lessons with Maurice van Essche at the Witwatersrand Technical College in 1944 and went on study visits to the US and Europe. From 1984 to 1985 he worked at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. But for the most part he was self-taught.
His interest in non-representational art grew and in the late 1950s and early ’60s he became fascinated by the work of the great European modern artists.
An accomplished pianist and lover of classical music, he observed a close link between the expressionistic, semi-abstract and abstract movements in the visual arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the non-representational aspects of the work of Stravinsky and his contemporaries.
He found inspiration in the world of line, colour, texture, form, rhythm and space, which appealed to his well-ordered, precise pharmacist’s mind and which he tried to portray in his paintings, etchings and ceramics.
Meerkotter was born in the then Pietersburg (Polokwane) on February 9 1922, and matriculated at Hoërskool Helpmekaar in Johannesburg.
His father was a talented pianist and organist but his life was a battle as he moved from town to town looking for work as a church organist and music teacher.
Meerkotter participated in group exhibitions in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Israel, Peru, Australia, the US, West Germany and Zimbabwe, and in the Florence and São Paulo biennales in the ’70s.
His work is in public and private collections around the country. He is survived by Annie, his wife of 70 years, and five children.