It has often been said that Michael Pettit’s work defies neat categorisation, and that multiplicity, shifting identities and relative truths are at the heart of his endeavour.

The same could be said of the man himself. The only category that comes close to defining Michael is woefully clichéd, and that is ‘an artist’s artist’. But, although overused, it is a significant and mysterious title, and one that fits him a good deal better than it does several who have claimed and diluted it.

Michael has been working non-stop and full-time for over three decades, totally immersed in his subject. He does not prepare specific works for specific shows or for specific effect. He does not do commissions. He does not enter competitions. He has no small degree of fame among connoisseurs, and seems only a little curious about whether people generally understand his work. His name fits effortlessly alongside South Africa’s very finest: Walter Batiss, Irma Stern, Robert Hodgins and company. He paints exactly what he wishes, irrespective of trends or fashion, and gives unimpeded rein to his very particular vision.

In our consumerist, image-conscious and commercial world, it’s hard not to feel that one is in the presence of an endangered species. Of him, it can truly be said that he lives to paint, to work. He is in love with the labour and the process of making pictures, consistently committed to quality. Moreover, he is someone who plays by his own rules, despite the risks.

In conversation, Michael’s genuine curiosity about the world and culture is evident. He’s an unlikely but passionate fan of Sondheim musicals; he surrounds himself with books; he loves film to the extent that he can, in detail, reconstruct a specific cinematic scene frame by frame, including colour and camera angle; and without pretension, he peppers his speech with quotes and references to his most loved authors: Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter and Alessandro Baricco. He lives, he says, a quality life: ‘barefoot in summer and winter’.

To use appropriately theatrical terminology, he is a one-man show. He takes care of his own publicity, printing, public relations, framing, management – everything. He has five storerooms filled with the stuff one doesn’t automatically consider when one thinks of an artist: packing crates, labels, gaffer tape and bubble-wrap. He is a man consumed by his art. ‘What do people do without it?’ he asks, referring to the creative act. ‘Even when it’s going badly, it’s kind of thrilling.’

And if ‘thrilling’ means to cause a sudden wave of emotion, his paintings certainly are. Having last exhibited three and a half years ago, Michael is gearing up for not one, but two ‘boldly contrasting parallel exhibitions’, and his small apartment is stacked with canvases. In his study-cum-studio, one wall supports tens of figurative paintings, and another, as many far larger lyrical abstracts – all meticulously bubble-wrapped.

It is the figurative works that have cemented his reputation. Here, they explore images and archetypes associated with theatre, travelling players, opera and the circus, and are unsettling in their brooding, playful darkness. There’s a distinctly surreal edge and supreme consonance: they transcend genre and invite the viewer to step into a self-contained universe where nuance and detail suggest hidden psychic truths with uneasily apprehended clarity.

It seems almost impossible that the man who painted these fantastically shifting, dream-like images with names like The Emissaries, The Magicians’ Congress and Seer is the same man who painted the abstracts. The latter are invitations to step into unbounded visual and mental space. Micro- and macro-cosmic, they are called things like Fire Ocean, The Sleeping Shore and The Sound of a Flower. They are breathtaking, sensual and sublime – the sorts of works one can’t help but lose oneself in: enticing pockets of contemplation and reflection made possible through paint.

There is no doubt that all of Michael’s work is a product of someone who considers, absorbs, thinks, gazes, reads, listens, and lives, ceaselessly and rigorously. These are works with timeless balance and inimitable paradoxical tension, from a master fantasist. ‘I don’t like to tie things up neatly; I like layers, multiplicity, the ongoing changingness of things,’ he explains. ‘I never think about whether or not a painting will sell. If it is as good as it can be, it finds its home. My works have gone to Japan, the UK, Germany, Europe and the USA. I find it an enormous compliment when someone who loves art wants one of my works, but this is not what drives me.’

He pauses for a moment to comment on the quality of the late afternoon sunlight as it streams through the windows, bringing the canvasses to life. Then he smiles a wry smile that would not be out of place on one his curiously ambiguous invented heads. ‘I take everything so seriously, and I do it as well as I can or else I don’t bother.’

He seems to shift and blur a little as he says this, and in the light, his boyish enthusiasm strips him of his 50-odd years. ‘All I want to do, is paint.’