Meyer van Rensburg

Artist in oils: semi abstract seascapes, wildlife and musicians

Meyer van Rensburg paints in oils and does charcoal sketches. He has been drawing ever since he can remember, first imitating illustrations in magazines at his parents home as a schoolboy, and then he started painting in oils for his own enjoyment, after watching his elder brother, Nick, painting in oils. Most of Meyers paintings are concentrated around a very strong central theme.

Meyer was born in the Northern Cape, in South Africa, and spent his youth as a farmers son, while attending school near Kimberley and later at Brits, near Pretoria. From this background emerges a love for gardening: planting, watering and cultivating seeds. This fits in well with the meaning of his first name: sower of seeds and the theme is obvious in many of his paintings. His earlier work were more abstract and surrealistic, but lately he has been concentrating more on different aspects of grasslands and wheat-fields, which have always fascinated him, as well as wildlife (painting animals and scenes both from Africa and England, where he now lives), and musicians, plus semi-abstract seascapes and cloud and air formations. He has had successful exhibitions in Four Elms, in 2017, where he sold five paintings, as well as in Edenbridge, in 2021, where another five paintings were sold .

Until 2004, Meyer worked as a music recording engineer in South Africa and also as a freelance radio presenter at Radio Pulpit, where he presented the very popular, Running the Race, interviewing Christian sportsmen on his live three-hour show on Friday mornings.
He got his doctorate in theology in 1998 and emigrated to the UK in 2004, currently residing in a country cottage in Greater London.
Meyers non-fiction books (as well as two anthologies of Afrikaans poetry) can be seen on Amazon. He writes extensively, regularly contributing articles to magazines, and is also a popular conference speaker. Since 2004 he has been lecturing in the UK, first in Bristol and then in London, where he has taught on television from time to time. He also travels worldwide, visiting Poland and NewZealand.
He is married to Lorraine and they are the proud parents of five daughters.
Currently Meyer is mostly at home in his studio, where he creates in his very colourful oils on canvas in techniques that he has perfected over the years, after admiring some South African artists, such as George Boys (with whom he shared an exhibition once), Judith Mason and Wim Blom.