Artist Database

Bill Ainslie’s artwork moved from an early expressionism of monumental figures to colourful, gestural abstraction later in his career. He obtained an Honours degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, and taught art at high school level before starting the Johannesburg Art Foundation, informally, in 1972. In 1977 after buying a large double-storey house in Saxonwold, Johannesburg, the foundation provided art education more formally, although there was no prescribed curriculum, it did not adhere to the directives of any governmental department of education, and it awarded no degrees or diplomas. Its teaching was tolerant, flexible and inclusive, and its philosophy encompassed social justice and political activism in the oppressive climate of apartheid-era South Africa. Ainslie was instrumental in the Thupelo Project of the mid-1980s which introduced many black South African artists to Abstract Expressionism, to the chagrin of the political opposition of the time which demanded socio-realistic art criticising the ruling apartheid regime. Ainslie was sadly killed in a car accident on his way home from a Pachipamwe Art Workshop at Cyrene Mission in Zimbabwe in 1989.