Artist with a wild side in demand all over the world

MBOMBELA – When meeting Charl Paul Bruwer for the first time he doesn’t strike you as the arty type. He doesn’t dress arty, speak arty or drive around town in a vintage arty-type car, and he sure as heck doesn’t care whether you think he is arty enough or not.

It does not take long, however, to realise that he is a tremendously talented artist with an almost endless list of art-related skills that range from illustration and oil painting to pastel and photography.

His works hang in lobbies, entrance halls and boardrooms all over the world, some towering more than three storeys high. Charl was born in Durban, grew up in Cape Town, went to high school in Sasolburg and attended art school in Johannesburg before first settling down in the Lowveld in 1981.

Growing up he remembers that his parents wanted him to get a decent education rather than wasting time drawing pictures. They were never really supportive of the idea of him doing art.

“Years later, though, I discovered some of my dad’s old notebooks in which he drew some pictures of the view from his office window. I was really amazed at the incredible detail in his drawings,” remembers Charl. “One of my teachers managed to convince my mom that they should try and get me into art school. It cost my folks an arm and a leg but I didn’t stick around for long. I really didn’t like it and all of a sudden I wasn’t the ‘meneer’ any longer. I was just another talented kid. And it wasn’t just artists, there were also musicians and ballerinas, so you can imagine that there were some very dodgy characters.” Before Charl went to the army he had some time off and came up with the idea of drawing a series of 20 comics for Vaal Weekblad. “It was about terrorists who tried to bomb Sasol and was loosely based on some comics I used to steal out of the old Greek’s shop as a child.”

Vaal Weekblad ended up buying the series for R800 in 1978, while his dad was earning R600 per month. “Then everyone sat back and took notice and my old man was very proud of me,” laughs Charl.

While in the army, former MD of Lowvelder, Pieter Cilliers, was friends with Charl’s commander. “One day he walked into my office and said, “Boet soek jy ‘n job?” They had a position available for a junior layout artist/cartoonist and since Charl was being discharged in three months’ time he gladly accepted the offer.

After just more than a year in the office Charl left Lowvelder rather abruptly following a skirmish with advertising manager, Ted Osborne, in the printing room. Charl then did silkscreen printing work for 15 years and also started a printing company.

In the late ’80s Charl felt like he was missing out on the new and exciting developments in the industry and decided to go to Johannesburg. He worked at an ad agency where he saw his first Apple Mac 2 and figured out what desktop publishing was. “I then came back to the Lowveld to open a full-colour publishing company since no one else here could do it. Back then everything was sent to Johannesburg for printing.”

Later he was also the creator and artist behind the popular Lowvelder comic strips, Roof Le Roux and Says Who/Sê Wie, which offered a light-hearted view of the news of the time. Ironically Charl started reverting to traditional art mediums with the turn of the century and did more painting and illustration work for Macmillan Publishers and Oxford University Press.

“It was a big score and good money,” he recalls. As the illustrating jobs got fewer with the struggling education system and publishing industry, Charl started doing more fine-art commissioned work for regular clients and interior designers. This got him doing artist’s impressions of hotels, buildings, restaurants and bars, to give clients something tangible to look at when deciding on a development’s look and feel.

These works also led to Charl doing some larger-than-life murals in high-end developments around the world. Apart from his artistic side, he also has a wild side and has explored some of the most remote parts of the Lowveld on motorbike, microlight and paraglider. He was also the founder and first chairman of Lowveld Slope Soaring Club, which still exists.