John Meyer has reached the enviable place artists fantasise about: his paintings sell before he has created them, before they are even a twinkle in his eye. He is a little annoyed about this because it has come so late in his life – he is 75 years old. "I would have preferred for this to have happened 20 years ago. I was living a different life back then. At times I was very unhappy because I felt rejected, sidelined and ignored by the art world," he says. He can’t fully account for his lack of popularity. He puts it down to being a figurative artist at a time when conceptualism was popular and now more recently when abstraction became the mode de jour. He is spirited and sprightly and keeps fit by standing in his cavernous studio in Kenilworth, Cape Town, painting all day. He became aware that his work was in demand when he sold a number of the 15 planned canvases for a series of paintings dubbed Lost in the Dust for an eponymous exhibition in 2014 for Everard Read’s Circa gallery....

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