Artist Richard Scott supports sea rescue with his golden money tree

Renowned Cape Town artist Richard Scott will she showcasing his work at the Suikerbossie Wine & Art Fiesta on 25 August 2023. The event is being held to raise funds for Station 8 Sea Rescue.

The very last available print of Scott’s famous “My Golden Money Tree” will go on auction on the night. Also available to view on the evening in the artists gallery will be his Lighthouse series.

“My Golden Money Tree” is valued at R23 000 ex VAT and is one of only 14 prints. It is part of Richard Scott’s “My Trees” collection.

Tickets for the event can be purchased on Quicket: https://qkt.io/ANY8te. Limited space available.

To gain some insight as to the success Richard Scott has achieved as an artist and why his works are so sought after by collectors, enjoy this essay describing him by Gus Silber

Richard Scott by Gus Silber
Richard Scott never signs his paintings. He stamps them with a wooden letter-block, leaving a lowercase impression of his first name in the thick of the impasto paste.
It has become his hallmark, a gleeful flourish that evokes childhood memories of potato-print and finger-paint, as well as a signature of his unfettered ambition to leave a lasting mark on the world of popular art. But even from far across the room, you don't need to see the stamp to know that you're looking at a Richard.

Against bright lashings of colour, his blazing-white subjects - trees, lighthouses, landscapes, and mostly, the female semi-nude form - are etched in deep black line, defining his claim to fame as a master of Contemporary Art minimalism.

In 2001, he sold his first painting, Two Trees in a Field of Sky, to the Hout Bay Gallery near Cape Town for R300. Since then, he has produced more than 3,500 works, and the going price for an original acrylic on canvas is R400,000. And this is just the beginning. "I will sell a painting one day for a million dollars," he says. He smiles as he says this, relishing his reputation as an outsider artist, a maverick who controls his career and his destiny on his own terms. Aside from his editioned prints, which he sells from an online store, he sells most of his work directly to a growing body of international collectors.

A self-taught artist, unless you count his high school art classes with Mr Fuel, at Norkem Park High in Kempton Park, Richard enjoys the special luxury of life as an accidental painter. He took up the brush as a casual sideline after running his own companies in IT and website development, and from the start, his works have sold almost as quickly as he can produce them.

While his signature style has remained consistent over the years, he is a restless experimenter, mixing his media and leaving his mark on surfboards, cellphones, slip-slops, wine bottles and a hip and witty fleet of Vespa scooters. But perhaps his free-form approach to art is best showcased by his range of Studio Works, large-format collages that started as doodles and scribblings on a canvas in his studio in Melkbosstrand, Cape Town.

"I used to clean my brushes on the wall in the studio," he says. "Soon, those little brushstrokes evolved into spontaneous, organic works, so I put two screws and a canvas on the wall, and started covering the canvas in stuff." Each Studio Work features a central semi-nude female figure, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of Richard's jet-setting life as an artist on the move. Everything from old credit cards, to beer-bottle labels, boarding passes, teabags, paintbrushes, and magazine covers - including one, cheekily, featuring his big money-making role-model, William Kentridge.

Richard never intended to sell the pieces - they were meant as mementoes and scrapbooks of his creative process - until one day a German collector walked into his studio, saw four of the works, and insisted on buying them on the spot. "You have to give people what they want," says Richard. "If a customer walks into a BMW dealership, and he wants a silver BMW, you can't give him a blue one. That's how I work. I give people what they want." And what they want, more and more, as it turns out, is Richard Scotts.

He paints because it's a business, he paints because he has collectors, he paints because it takes him around the world. But more than anything else, he paints because it's fun. The joy in his work shines through, concealing the intense focus and discipline with which he crafts his distinctive style. When it comes to his philosophy as a pop artist, Richard likes quoting Picasso - "Art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth"; "Everything you can imagine is real" - but his greatest lesson came from a man named Barney Pretorious, his boss at his first job as a technical illustrator.

"Barney said to me one day, you don't want to be a sheep, you want to be a shepherd. Take on the difficult stuff, not the easy stuff." It isn't easy making a living, or even a sideline, as an artist, but Richard believes he has proved himself. "I say to people, the train's coming," he says. "I'm not prepared to put you in the driving seat, but you can hook on your carriage and join me for the journey. If I tell you I'm going to sell pieces for a million, you'd better believe it, because the Richard Scott train is coming."