Notes

Aleksanders (Sacha) Klopcanovs (1912–1997) and Elma Vestman (1914–1991) founded the Kalahari Ceramic Studio in South Africa. Klopcanovs was born in 1912 in Tashkent, the capital city of present-day Uzbekistan. In 1932, after compulsory military service in the navy, Klopcanovs entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Riga, Latvia, where he met Vestman. He studied figurative painting, mural painting and sculpture. The couple fled to Sweden during World War II and continued their studies at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. In February 1948, Klopcanovs followed Vestman to South Africa and joined her at the Linnware Studio in Olifantsfontein. Later that year the two artists left Linnware and set up the Kalahari Studio in Bramley, Johannesburg. In July 1950, the couple relocated the studio to Cape Town.

Despite his involvement with the Kalahari Studio, Klopcanovs’s primary interest was oil painting and he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa between 1961 and 1973. During this period, he sold paintings in Sweden and the United States. Two of Klopcanovs's paintings are in the Museum of Modem Art (MOMA), USA. His oil paintings of the 1950s and 1960s are primarily figurative, although landscape was also an interest.