It’s a little confusing. In which of Nicolaas Maritz’s two Darling houses does this artist really feel at home?

I’ve driven here with the gallery owner who sells a lot of his work, Penny Dobbie, and we both decide his heart is in the old platteland farmhouse in Nemesia Street, just off the main road, where he works and used to live before he moved into his second, bigger house on the hill.

The new house is rambling ’60s suburbia and he lives in it with the UCT music professor who’s shared his life for the past few decades, composer Hendrik Hofmeyr. Fortunately it’s getting a Nicolaas makeover.

Inevitably this will involve Nicolaas’s paintbrush, in much the same way as he transformed the Nemesia Street house into a unique dwelling as forceful in its individuality as Helen Martin’s Owl House, though on a smaller scale. One day it will be the Nicolaas Maritz Museum. But that day is far off, hopefully. Nicolaas is 48.

Entering, you immediately find yourself inside the artist’s creative head. Paintings cover just about every available surface, mostly in frames but also occasional decoration on walls, cupboards and ceilings. Bold, lively creatures, cats, landscapes and still lifes. All done in a style and colours that are so distinctive and compelling, they’re in almost every major South African corporate and public collection.

Though deceptively naïve, in a retro technique evocative of the ’30s and ’40s, these multilevelled paintings manage at the same time to be both meaningful and decorative – to use a word that’s loaded in the art world, where it implies art that’s not serious.

‘Some critic once said about my pictures: “You can hang them in your dining room – they won’t put your guests off their dinner,”’ Nicolaas says, engagingly self-mocking. ‘I don’t deal in aggression.’

Yet there’s nothing pretty-pretty about this lot, or the hot, bright colours he uses – often ordinary household paint, including enamel, much to the horror of purists. Stoep red is a favourite. So is what he calls kitchen green – ‘what used to be known as eau de nil,’ he says giving the words a larney ring.

It’s a kitchen-green chair that I sit on as we drink tea and eat chocolate biscotti from the village deli, The Marmalade Cat, in a kitchen barely big enough for the kitchen table, but bursting at the seams with Nicolaas’s creativity. He’s even painted two sets of jolly cats and fruit bowls on the kitchen cupboard.

It’s an appealing trait some artists have, this desire to treat the building you live in as a blank canvas. Irma Stern did it in some rooms of her Cape Town home, and the Bloomsbury artists did it on a major scale at Charleston, the famous Sussex farmhouse where they created a treasury of art on the furniture and walls.

The same trait runs in the Maritz family. Nicolaas’s parents were both architects. ‘You could say the family was arty,’ is how he describes the rather Bohemian Pretoria environment inwhich he grew up, where the kids were given crayons and water paints instead of sweets, and where he still clearly remembers ‘that enamel paint moment’ when at the age of about six he first became aware of the ‘flat area of bright colour’ on the kitchen table, and the fact that ‘you could take a tomato colour and paint with it’. He was always making pictures, as were the older members of the family.
‘My grandmother’s sister was an illustrator, as well as a ’20s flapper, and if they had an old cupboard that was kind of threadbare, she’d do a little pattern on it.”

Naturally Nicolaas takes it a bit further. On an old built-in cupboard in the front room that he thinks was a drinks cabinet, he’s put a wicked, gleeful face in profile above two deliciously self-possessed goldfish, one holding a painted key in its mouth. The key to the cupboard.

This dark, alluring front room has been turned into an unexpectedly dramatic space by two magnificent Oriental carpets suspended between interleading areas like stage curtains. Last August, Nicolaas hosted a tango show here during Darling’s Voorkamerfest, the annual theatrical event in which local and international performers put on shows in the front rooms of Darling residents’s homes. I can’t imagine a more lavish and apt venue for all that smouldering Latino passion.

But the real drama is in what used to be the dining room. This is where Nicolaas’s creative vision really let loose, after one of his and Hendrik’s regular visits to Italy to see friends the composer made during his 10 years there.

‘We went to Ravenna to see the mosaics in the churches and I liked the idea of all those riches,’ says Nicolaas, beaming. He has put some of those riches on the walls of the dining room, painting the ceiling navy blue like a summer night sky. The result is an unanticipated little gem in the heart of the house. ‘It’s based roughly on the early Christian iconography. That peacock is Byzantine, symbolising paradise. The lion is the Venetian lion of St Mark. The sheep is the good Christian...’

His new paintings are also hanging here, part of his current exhibition, which fills several rooms. In one room it’s archival work he’s loath to part with. ‘I need to keep it as a reminder of certain things I want to remain in touch with.’

This room used to be his studio and it makes a fascinating retrospective, these paintings going back almost as far as his years as an art student at UCT when, as a young Afrikaner, an outsider, he tried to find some kind of artistic identity in what he remembers as a ‘gloomy pseudo-socialist kind of liberal stew’.

Nothing came easy in those early years. Trying to sell his art later in London he was told it was ‘too African’ for a white person, ‘too bright.’ Later, his Cape Town exhibitions, while he was lecturing at UCT and Stellenbosch, received ‘ghastly reviews, not one good one in a row. It was only when critics like Benita Munitz started using words like “zippy” and “zesty” that there was finally light where there had been darkness.’

His first home in Darling was a little church he bought in 1992. ‘It made a great press moment. Fairlady loved it. But the locals were unimpressed. At 8am on Sunday mornings they’d be knocking at the door asking: “Is the flea market open yet?”

‘Then when my family came to visit and we all had to sleep in one big room, I realised the middle class had a point. Two years later I bought a proper house in Nemesia Street.’

Eventually, however, the paintings took over the whole place and he and Hendrik were forced to find a bigger home to live in.
He’s already changed the new house substantially. Watch this space.