Notes

Fred Page endured a miserable childhood marked by fatherly abandonment and the death of his mother when he was ten. He drifted between relatives and orphanages before entering a farming trade school; thereafter variously jobbing as a shepherd, barman, gold miner, tyre maker at Firestone and military serviceman. In 1947, aged 39, Page entered art school in Port Elizabeth. Tutored by Jack Heath and Dorothy Kay, his drafting capabilities were given focus. He held his debut solo in 1958 at age 51. Page is well known for his austere and unsentimental compositions depicting architectural features of the Central and South End - historical suburbs of Port Elizabeth. The Powell Collection, however, focuses on his category-defying
fantasy works, notably works in oil. Early on Page settled on a reduced palette of black, white and matt ochre. In 1967, he switched from tempera to quick-drying acrylics and inks, and only occasionally worked in oil. “Colour activates the picture and that I don’t want,” Page said in 1971. “I want silence and stillness.”¹
Page admired the technique of painters William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich and René Magritte, but derived creative inspiration for his dreamlike scenarios from literature – notably Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allen Poe. “If I had to state a definite ambition in my painting, I think it would be to emulate the literary achievements of these men to the highest degree possible within the limited sphere of my own media and abilities”.² Although frequently characterised as a surrealist, his work more closely resembles the theatricality of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. Jeanne Wright persuasively argues that his psychological work is “an idiosyncratic form of magical realism overlaid with parochial and autobiographical details from his
personal environment.”³

^1. Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel (2011) Fred Page: Ringmaster of the Imagination, Port Elizabeth: Jeanne Wright and Cecil Kerbel,page 60.
^2. Ibid, page 126.
^3. Ibid, page 82.

Provenance

Die Kunskamer, Cape Town, 3 May 2006.

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

Exhibited

Welgemeend Art Month, Cape Town, Herken/Verken: Paying Homage to Die Kunskamer, the gallery that changed the course of South African Art, 5 to 31 August 2022.