Braam Kruger - Artist

Braam Kruger





Braam Kruger gently agitated people toward seeing the possibilities of beauty in, well, just about anything. He, of course, was a hell-raiser too. At an early age (Boksburg, Vanderbijlpark, Nigel) he was expelled from schools, later he would open restaurants doomed as commercial successes, but for the periods open, actual dining rooms for sensualists and people who saw like him, felt like him, admired his sybaritic splendour and had no money, Braam didn't care too much, as long as he could share in an experience of the senses, be it in the restaurants, the many articles in newspapers and magazines, the radio and television presenting, or in just having people over to cook for them, talk to them, he was a student of the senses and made no apologies for it. He confused critics and audiences alike with his seemingly un-intellectual approach to his art.

Braam Kruger, with his alter ego Kitchenboy, have a resume, a list of a life, that overwhelms you, you simply cannot take in the range of things the man managed to fit in. He lived more in any one of his years that we do in our whole lives. His works are represented in most public galleries & museums in SA, including the SA National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, SASOL Collection, University of Pretoria, University of Natal, Pretoria Technicon, Cape Library Services, SA Nursing Council, Northern Province Art Gallery, Pietersburg, Walter Battiss Museum, The Netherlands Ministry for Culture, Het Sterckshof Museum, Antwerp. He studied Graphic design, Fine art in Pretoria, then Lithography in Belgium. He travelled the world of course.

But it was in his painting that he did the most travelling, to interior worlds, using exterior forms. The nude, the female form draped, undraped, food, suggestions of landscapes, odd cultural juxtapositions, in an almost faux classical style, sometimes having a little fun, sometimes deeply serious, Kruger's art was that he was never one thing, he shifted, he refused to sit still and be classified.

I can't say I ever really knew the man, he fed me at two occasions, once at Kitchenboy in Troyeville in the 90's, where I was overwhelmed by merely the waitresses, and his insistence of try this, now, try this, now this, try, this, now, exploding my senses. The other was when he was living sometime, in Bellevue east, Johannesburg. I was with a friend who knew him well, Nicole. She took me over to see his paintings and I understood then, the descriptions I had heard, was later to hear, that he wept when he painted. His paintings are great weepings. He cooked for us and I remember the figs in chilli, the ginger, the pure delicious narcotic assault on the sense that is Braam Kruger. Not just taste, sight, but touch, hearing and yes scent.

After a stroke in 2000, he learnt to paint and draw again, the first work being for his doctor in blood from his IV. Signing his works with his age as he advances. Famous food coloums for the Business Day follow. He became food editor for Rapport and was nominated for a Mondi Award in 2007. He spent the last months of his life with his beloved in Heildelburg and was still working full-time on writing and commissions, his last article for Rapport appearing a week before his death.

It would be easy to say that through the large volume of Work and Memories, Braam Kruger is still with us. But he was more than just the five senses splayed out. His death at any age would have been too early. And now that he is gone, who but his beloved will carry on the work of grabbing us by our material nature, showing us through the senses our interior worlds of beauty and delight. His humour, his positive gentleness always pushing. He was someone that I never knew was such a big part of our cultural landscape until he was gone. He was that natural and unobtrusive and large.



for full exhibition & pictures - go here > http://www.jhblive.co.za/live/publications_view.jsp?pub_id=258119