ohn Kramer was born in Worcester, Western Cape in 1946. At school he received tuition at the Hugo Naude Art Centre, Worcester and later majored in painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. In 1968 he won the Michaelis prize. He holds a diploma in Fine Art. In 1970 he joined the South African Museum where he was head of the Exhibitions division for many years. During his museum career he designed and, with his team, built many displays and exhibitions. He also had the opportunity to visit most major museums and galleries in Canada, USA, Israel, Paris and London.
Although he had a full-time job, he continued to paint at night and weekends and participated in many group shows. In the 1980s he had two successful one-man exhibitions.
In 1996 he was invited to participate in Kunst uit Zuid-Africa at the Cultureel Centrum, Mechelen, Belgium and in 1997 Freedom Flight in the Westfries Museum, Hoorn, Netherlands. Other group shows include Contemporary South African Art 1985-1995 from the South African National Gallery Permanent Collection (1996) and Art into Architecture - South African National Gallery (1997).
In 2002 he left the museum to pursue a full-time painting career. In September 2014 he had another major solo show at the UCT Irma Stern Museum.
John is well known for his realistic paintings of small town shops and algemene handelaars – a project which he has been pursuing relentlessly since the early 1970s, when he first realised that these “ordinary” buildings were disappearing – “the supermarket was coming to town”. John has travelled extensively looking for subject matter, visiting many small towns and dorps to photograph the buildings he loves to paint. He has built up a huge archive of source material in the process, much of it reflecting small town South Africa.
As he explains in his book: “My paintings are not about architecture as such, about structures that have been designed; instead they have to do with buildings that have grown and matured over time, that show the ravages of alteration, that reveal their amusing quirks and peculiarities, with all the eccentric bits and pieces added by their owners.”
As he says: “Ultimately my aim is to create a painting that makes a statement about a specific place that existed at a specific moment in time.”
Over the years his style of painting has loosened up, with more emphasis on brushstrokes and paint texture, as opposed to his earlier work which tended to be harder and flatter and more hyper-realistic - He remains a committed realist.
For him, this is the only approach that conveys the message he wants to put across. Concentrating on light and shadow, tonal values, verticals and horizontals and by eliminating any presence of living beings from his paintings, he has created a body of works that is uniquely South African.
His work is represented in many private, corporate and public collections, including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Durban Art Gallery and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth.
John is the older brother of the famous singer/songwriter, David Kramer. He is married, has two sons and lives in the Gardens, Cape Town.
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John Kramer
John Kramer