Deborah Poynton

Deborah Poynton (born in 1970) is a South African painter best known for her monumental, hyper-realistic, hyper-detailed, nude portraits, usually of friends and family. She lives and works in Cape Town. Born in Durban, South Africa in 1970, her parents founded and ran an anti-apartheid conference centre and died when she was a child. Poynton grew up in South Africa, England, Swaziland and the United States, often moving to different boarding schools. Poynton knew from the start that she wanted to be an artist. Before returning to South Africa to paint, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design for two years between 1987 and 1989, but did not graduate.

Quotes

"Deborah Poynton's Model for a World: A Survey of 25 Years of Painting" (2014)

The New Church Museum. "Deborah Poynton's Model for a World: A Survey of 25 Years of Painting". 2014. 13 May 2014. Curated by Kirsty Cockerill, Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• I have just carried on doing what I did as a child. It’s been one long continuous stream of making pictures to feel a sense of connectedness. Painting this way is a wordless exclamation….Sometimes people get cross with it because they hate that it’s not about anything, and that I just carry on with all this realism. This fiddle-faddle, this knitting.
• Who cares if you can paint something that looks real? It is totally banal. There is no worth in that, except as a kind of sport, an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination. Now painting something that seems to contain reality – that is truly moving.
• There is relief in dwelling in a not-new picture, in embracing the foolishness of the formula, in discovering the beauty of each small detail that is woven into the picturesque whole. And while we are there, noticing the leaves, the clouds, the way the paint has described the folds of silk, perhaps something indescribable can be felt.
• I lived in many different places as I was growing up. This gave me an awareness of difference, the understanding that security cannot be found in the outside world.

"Deborah Poynton: Scenes of a Romantic Nature" (2018)

"Deborah Poynton: Scenes of a Romantic Nature". Contemporary And (in German). Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. 2015. Retrieved 2 February 2018.

• In life, as in pictures, there is only the Romantic. Behind the scenes of our lives, there is everything unspoken, unseen, unknown and nothing.
• Art is an offering, a show that mirrors the show we form around ourselves as we move through our scenery.
• Art is always artful, a ruse, a trick. It is a court fool, jumping up and down, aping its masters. Art is part of the dream that we inhabit.

Quotes About Deborah Poynton

• Poynton's paintings are more about the act of looking, of exposing the "trickery" behind traditional artistic practices, than they are windows onto a surreal world.
  • Thurman, Chris (6 March 2015). "Half Art: Shoddy Presidents Far from Scene of Idyll". www.bdlive.co.za. Archived from the original on 7 March 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2015.

• By constructing spaces, placing slightly discordant objects amongst seemingly natural landscapes, Poynton creates a tension within her work that is intended to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of the act of perception.
  • Thurman, Chris (6 March 2015). "Half Art: Shoddy Presidents Far from Scene of Idyll". www.bdlive.co.za. Archived from the original on 7 March 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2015.

• While most of her work can be categorized as realism, a few series depart from her usual aesthetic in a more abstract project. Her current exhibition, Scenes of a Romantic Nature, draws on her connection to Germany by referencing the landscape paintings of German artist Caspar David Friedrich.
  • Thurman, Chris (6 March 2015). "Half Art: Shoddy Presidents Far from Scene of Idyll". www.bdlive.co.za. Archived from the original on 7 March 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2015.

• Her work often conflates tropes from traditional art history, from compositional techniques to poses of her subjects, and the indices of contemporary life to create a sense of chaotic inscrutability; in this way, Poynton creates work which is aesthetically engaging and intellectually confounding.
  • H (June 2006). "Deborah Poynton". www.artsouthafrica.com. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2015.

• Viewing Poynton's work is a personal experience. The story that comes to your mind is different from that of someone else. There is no right or wrong. All ideas and associations are welcome in the world of Deborah Poynton.
  • Drents Museum. 03 October 2021, "Deborah Poynton: Beyond Belief".. Retrieved 25 March 2025.