A Book To Add To Your Collection: Paul

PHOTOS Gregor Röhrig and courtesy of The Paul Du Toit Archive WORDS Tracy Greenwood

In a touching tribute to her late husband, artist Paul Du Toit, his wife Lorette has published a beautiful book documenting his life and works.

Lorette du Toit is the first to admit that putting together a book about her late husband just a few years after he succumbed to cancer took a heavy emotional toll on her. It did, however, prove cathartic, and the end product is quite clearly a labour of love.

The book, simply titled Paul and edited by Ashraf Jamal, is filled with images of Paul’s signature “modern cave paintings”, childlike sculptures and sketches, scribbles, doodles and notes.

Lorette and Paul both grew up in Roodepoort on the West Rand and went to the same school. Even then, says his childhood sweetheart, Paul was always doodling. But despite his obvious love for art, he didn’t have the luxury of working as an artist straight out of school. He became a computer programmer and only started to delve into art about 10 years later, in the ’90s.

The defining moment came on their first trip to Italy together when Paul, standing in front of Michelangelo’s David, decided there and then to follow his heart. “We arrived back in Cape Town and he started to paint,” says Lorette.

Paul was a maverick and loathed authority, she says. To him, art was never a cultural weapon. This flaunting of convention may be one of the reasons he took so much flak from the local art fraternity. The fact that Paul had no formal art training may be another.

In the words of the artist himself: “I often joke and say that I studied art at the Independent School for Self education. Pick up a paintbrush and just start creating.” Truthfully, says Lorette, the fact that Paul didn’t study art made him, and by implication his work, uncorrupted. He was on his own planet – which is where the name of his first website, planetpaul.co.za, comes from.

Lorette is slowly piecing the bits of her life together, and the creation of this tribute to the love of her life is an integral part of the healing process.