Vetkat Regopstaan Kruiper

-Bushman artist of the Kalahari-

Vetkat Kruiper is a contemporary San or Bushman artist who is continuing the unbroken artistic tradition of his ancestors, who for many thousands of years have left their beautiful and highly sophisticated rock paintings and engravings over a vast area of southern Africa. Art that has been carbon-dated as far back in time as 77,000 years.

Keyan Tomaselli, a professor at the University of Natal, South Africa, says: "Vetkat's art is unique. It is of the Kalahari, of the wind and the sand dunes, the rain, the flora and the fauna. It is the San speaking here and now."

Vetkat's "studio" is a bright red sand dune on a rented farm named Blinkwater, on the border of the Khalaghadi Transfrontier Game Reserve, where Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa meet. His hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited this region for aeons, long before the arrival of either the black or the white settlers who dispossessed them. Vetkat's art, while completely original, bears a stunning resemblance to the rock art of his ancestors. Art which Vetkat has never seen.

Vetkat began his artistic career as a part of an NGO art program to help the dispossessed . When the funding was discontinued, he continued to paint, having discovered his great passion in life. Vetkat lives as much as possible in the old way, gathering wild foods from the veld, and living in a tiny grass hut with his wife Belinda and their five Kalahari dogs.