my father

My father was a gentle, calm and thoughtful man who loved nature.

He loved his steep hillside garden in Hilton in which he had planted with many indigenous trees and plants. It was lush and green thanks to the frequent mists. More conventional gardeners would have said it was overgrown, but for him it was a paradise, his own Garden of Eden.

As years went by, his garden became an island, his island, as suburban development gradually replaced the remaining spots of the natural bush that had once covered the entire escarpment. He loved indigenous trees and planted many of them.

He would spend hours a day fascinated by all the forms of life in it: plants, insects, birds, monkeys, giant snails, more rarely snakes, chameleons, duikers, land crabs and the nocturnal porcupines that left quills, even on the doorstep, but went unseen. He was fascinated by their organic forms and their place in nature. Sometimes he would be enthralled by a single leaf or flower.

The forms of rocks, stones and bones also inspired him. He would go and collect interesting pieces of the red shale common to Natal. If he spotted bones next the road or in a nature reserve, he would stop to take them. Some of his oil paintings feature these objects.

For him fungus “flowers” on dead logs were not a sign of rotting and decay, they were beautiful “flowers”.

I believe that my father’s oil paintings were his way of meditating on nature and life itself.

The view from my father’s home was an expanse over Pietermaritzburg and the rolling hill beyond towards the coast and Durban. Green and lush in summer and brown and dry in winter.

Often in the morning, he looked out on an expanse of cloud below, bright fluffy white in the early sun. The ridge becoming a coast along a cloud ocean. In summer, the summer storms often brought dramatic effects with dark threatening thunderclouds, heavy downpours below them and wispy upswirls. These views and the dramatic cloud effects are the subject of most of his watercolours. He called them cloudscapes.

The view and the cloudscapes were an endless source of inspiration for my father. They were also one of the reasons why my father did not want to move from his Hilton home, even though it was not at all suitable for a person of his age.

My father was a professor in the English Department at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, where he specialized in Wordsworth. He loved his work, but except for quick watercolours, it didn’t leave him enough time for his other love, painting. So, he only returned to it after he had retired.

In terms of painting style, my father said he was inspired by the British artists Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He was also impressed by the paintings of Diamond Bozas, a fellow South African artist who lived in Eshowe and painted many Zululand landscapes.

My mother, Lynnette, passed away in 2017 after being bedridden for a year. After her death, my father seems to have become fascinated by the cycles of nature. At least this is a theme common to many of his later paintings. The idea that death and decay lead to (re)generation and new life, for example, the beautiful fungus “flowers” growing on a rotting log or branch. The bones in his paintings may also refer to my mother’s hip problems from which she had suffered for most of her life and, in the end, were the indirect cause of her death. Given the possible symbolism in my father’s oil paintings, they may have been a way for him to deal with the grief of my mother’s passing.

The Tatham Gallery in Pietermaritzburg held an exhibition of his works in 2021 titled Great Creating Nature. At the time, all exhibitions were hampered by the COVID pandemic, but my father was very happy that his work was on view to the public.

Tragically, my father died shortly after the exhibition closed. He was found murdered in his Hilton home. It was a senseless killing of a peaceful old man by three men who came to his house one morning.

- Charles Hugo