Baobab Valley Painting

“I love fresh, bright colors. Why paint dull stuff? People want to brighten up their lives. You’re only painting light; where there’s no light there’s no color.” Willie Strydom is an artist with a singular mission: “I want to brighten up your life. I create happy paintings that put a smile on your face. There’s enough other nonsense in this world.” Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1951, Strydom loved art and painting from an early age. At primary school he would draw, sketch and paint scenes from his life. He was convinced his art teacher didn’t like him much. “I think it was because I was better than him. I always showed his mistakes to him, and he didn’t appreciate that.” He studied Fine Art at the Pretoria Technikon but only started thinking of himself as an artist in his mid-40s, after moving to the sub-tropical South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. “After tech I went to the army, worked at a bank, for the municipality, for a friend doing technical drawings, and worked for years doing kitchen cupboard installations.” Since selling seven paintings at his first exhibition – at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake in 2000 – Strydom’s colourful interpretations of South African life have found their way into art galleries and private art collections across the country and abroad. Although mainly known for his colorful expressive landscape art portraying the Highveld and Boland regions, Strydom also loves to portray the haphazard architecture of older suburbs like Cape Town’s brightly colored Bo-Kaap/ Malay Quarter. He is also renowned for his beautiful and colorful vineyard paintings. Strydom’s work has travelled to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Cyprus, the UK and many more countries while he currently resides in Pretoria.