Artists

After winning a scholarship to the Edinburgh College of Art and serving with distinction in the Burmese campaign during WWII, Normand Dunn took up the position of art master at Hilton College in 1947. In addition to his teaching duties he wrote a weekly column for the Natal Witness and, under the pseudonym Falk, provided satirical cartoons for the newspaper. Appropriately, and having already committed himself to an African aesthetic, Dunn held a joint exhibition with Walter Battiss at the Neil Sackler Gallery in Pietermartizburg in 1961. Then, and throughout that decade, his work might be seen as a unique, decorative, startlingly-coloured conflation of bold Zulu motifs, classical Aegean friezes and a European Gothic spirit. The work Paw-paw Tree with Shields, purchased for the nation by the then South African National Gallery in 1969, is a fine, rare example from this period. Dunn had a dramatic shift in style and scale after moving to his Swellendam cottage in 1975 and beginning his professional relationship with Everard Read. The work from this latter period of the artist’s career, typified by everyday views from the surrounding towns and nearby coastal villages, is memorable for its folksy subjects, intense, whimsical colour, close, humorous observation, and warm, moral anecdotes.