Joan Clare was the first South African artist to exhibit purely abstract paintings. That was in 1955. Now, at age eighty, she finds the creative process as exciting as ever. A swim early every morning in the cold waters of Walker Bay near her home in Hermanus helps a lot to stimulate her mentally and physically, she told Maré Mouton.

Many artists reach a high age. South African sculptor Edoardo Villa has just turned ninety and is still working, painter Gregoire Boonzaier recently died at age ninety-five. Joan Clare’s current exhibition in Hermanus (with Pretoria artist Lynette ten Krooden) includes some earlier works, but also new paintings and her latest interest, photographs.

Joan, in customary denim jeans and jacket during her visit to the gallery, is sprightly and decisive.

“As long as you are interested in things, it keeps you going,” she says emphatically.

Joan’s interest became focused on abstract art at an early stage. She studied in Johannesburg under Maurice van Essche and then in London at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Camberwell Art School, but she was influenced more by other artists’ work on exhibition than by her teachers. In 1948 one particular exhibition she saw in London had a profound influence on her work. Titled “40 000 Years of Modern Art”, it showed prehistoric art from all over the world alongside work by contemporary artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Klee, Miro, Modigliani and Henry Moore.

“The comparisons were exciting and exhaustive,” wrote Joan many years later, “and served to draw the art of 40 000 years closer together in a great language of art – a language in which abstraction and expression are closely related.”

From London she continued to Paris, where her impressions were further strengthened by exhibitions at the Museum of Man and one of abstract and non-objective art. She was struck by the mobiles of Alexander Calder, which to her showed that expression was no longer dependent on objective portrayal.

Joan took part in group exhibitions in London and 1950–52 in New Zealand, where she was living at the time. On her return to South Africa in 1952 she embarked on a quest for pure abstraction, and this process continues to this day. At the opening of Joan’s current exhibition, artist Louis van Heerden called it the “intellectual struggle with the painted surface of the canvas”. At one stage she moved towards a hard-edged style and used casien paints (this was before the development of acrylic paints) and also did silkscreens and linocuts. She now prefers the versatility of oil and also experiments with photographs, sometimes joining images together to create new shapes and patterns.

Her work is not symbolic of anything; doesn’t have a hidden meaning. An event, an image from nature or music may set her mind at work, but in the end it is about the interplay of the shapes, lines, colours, tones and textures of the work itself. Esmé Berman in Art & Artists of South Africa said Joan Clare “…has set herself certain abstract problems – concerned with the visual tensions which can be established on a two-dimensional surface”.

Joan says orchestral music is the closest analogy to her work. One should look at the paintings as one would listen to an orchestra or jazz band, with the different instruments interplaying with one another to create rhythms and moods.

Her art has always been a very personal quest, and at times she withdrew from “the exhibition circuit” for years. If a particular painting was sold, she wouldn’t comply with a request by the gallery to paint “another just like that one”. She taught at teachers’ training colleges and at age fifty went to university again to study landscape architecture, as she was helping her architect husband in preparing renderings of projects. She was nevertheless a prominent figure in contemporary art. After her first solo exhibition in Johannesburg in 1955, she was the following year invited to take part in the prestigious Venice Biennale (along with Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Erik Laubscher, Alexis Preller, Edoardo Villa, e.a.) and the First Quadrennial of South African Art, and in 1959 in the Sao Paulo Biennale. In 1966 she had a prestige exhibition with Bettie Cilliers-Barnard at the Pretoria Art Museum.

Her husband passed away some five years ago, but she shows no sign of slowing down. Early each morning, if the sea is not too choppy, she goes for a swim. (She started off by wearing a wetsuit, but has now discarded that.) The way she sees it, the positive side of living alone is that she can paint whenever she wants to, to continue the benign battle to create music from shapes and colours and textures on canvas and paper.