Boshoff, Adriaan
ADRIAAN BOSHOFF (1935 – 18 April 2007) was born in Pretoria in 1935. He is a self-taught painter of landscapes, seascapes, still life and figures. Adriaan works in oils and has become known for portraying everyday scenes in his unmistakable impressionistic style. His work has been exhibited and collected throughout the world.
Adriaan Boshoff is one of the great impressionists painting today. He is a reclusive man, an artist who is only really happy in his studio surrounded by paint and canvas. If any art can be termed an investment, Boshoff’s work comes the closest.
Today, Boshoff works in a new studio built for him at his daughter’s rural home near Hartbeespoort Dam. He is 70 years old, a man who has embraced Christianity with all its tenets and strictures. His faith seems to have helped him discover the inner peace that had so eluded him in his early years – and it is this peace that the art lover sees in the maturity, the grace and, indeed, the serenity of his work.
Boshoff is first and always a South African and some of his most memorable works are landscapes depicting the veld with cattle crazing. They have about them the epitome of that elusive spirit that makes South African émigrés long for home and dream of sun-baked days on the stubby veld.
Adriaan said: “I love my country, its people – especially its children, and its natural beauty. In my work I endeavour to portray things in a way which people are able to understand. I enjoy capturing scenes and images I see and experience around me, as I perceive it – as it impressed itself on me. For this reason I often revisit painted scenes to ascertain whether my interpretation was correct. I have found a certain measure of realism in my life, and that is what I seek to share with others. Every work I do must be better that the previous one. I have not produced my best work yet. Perhaps it will be the next one… or maybe the one after that”.