Dirk Meerkotter, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 95, was a prominent painter and abstract artist whose best piece of advice came from one of South Africa's most avant-garde artists, his friend Walter Battiss.
He told Meerkotter to get a job with a regular salary and a decent pension so that he could paint freely without the pressure of having to sell to survive. Meerkotter became a pharmacist and worked eight hours a day until he retired at 55.
While at work he never stopped thinking about art, art exhibitions and artists. He sketched ideas in the pad that was always with him. When he got home he went straight to his studio and started painting, etching or producing ceramics that he fired in an oven in his garage.
He had a prodigious work ethic and was so productive that he was able to show new works of art every 15 months.
At 28 he had his first solo exhibition at the Constantia Gallery in Johannesburg. His talent was immediately recognised and that was the first of 87 solo exhibitions. One of his last and most successful was in Stellenbosch in 2009.
By then his abstracts were fetching upwards of R30000.
Most of his friends were artists or gallery owners like Battiss, Sidney Goldblatt, Ronald Mylchreest, Fred Schimmel, Berenice Michelow, Nel Erasmus, Cecil Skotnes, Larry Scully and Taffy Whippman.
From the early 1950s he enthusiastically engaged with them in discussions about modern and contemporary art movements such as post-impressionism, cubism, expressionism, futurism, surrealism and abstract expressionism.
Meerkotter took lessons with Maurice van Essche at the Witwatersrand Technical College in 1944 and went on study visits to the US and Europe. From 1984 to 1985 he worked at the Cit� Internationale des Arts in Paris. But for the most part he was self-taught.
His interest in non-representational art grew and in the late '50s and early '60s he became increasingly fascinated by the work of the great European modern artists.
An accomplished pianist and lover of classical music, he observed a close link between the expressionistic, semi-abstract and abstract movements in the visual arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the non-representational aspects of the work of Stravinsky and his contemporaries.
He was keenly interested in, alert to and concerned by sociopolitical developments in South Africa, but did not see himself as a storytelling visual artist.
He found inspiration in the world of line, colour, texture, form, rhythm and space, which appealed to his well-ordered, precise pharmacist's mind and which he tried to portray in his paintings, etchings and ceramics.
He was a stern critic both of his own work and that of others.
He wrote hundreds of art reviews for the Afrikaans and English press, particularly the Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times. His wife, Annie, whose influence on his ideas and work as an artist was profound, would type them out while he was still writing them in longhand. Then, invariably late at night, they would drop them off at the newspaper offices.
Meerkotter was born in the then Pietersburg (Polokwane) on February 9 1922, and matriculated at Ho�rskool Helpmekaar in Johannesburg.
His father was a talented pianist and organist but his life was a constant battle for survival as he moved from town to town looking for work as a church organist and music teacher to support his family.
Meerkotter participated in group exhibitions in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Israel, Peru, Australia, the US, West Germany and Zimbabwe, and in the Florence and S�o Paulo biennales in the 1970s.
His work - oils, graphics, ceramics, water colour and ink - is in public and private collections around the country.
He is survived by Annie, his wife of 70 years, and five children.
1922-2017..