Walt Viviers

Walt Viviers is a Pretoria-based multimedia artist working across art, design, video and digital. He paints and illustrates, shoots photography and video, designs brands and websites, builds small apps and browser games, and writes — a practice that moves fluidly between traditional and digital craft, and lately more and more toward video and social, in front of the camera as much as behind it.

At the centre it is still people and art. His fine-art work — acrylic and mixed media — sits at the intersection of realism and Pop Art, drawing on Chinese brushstroke traditions, Rembrandt's handling of light, and the visual storytelling of sequential art: images that read with clarity from a distance yet reveal bold, expressive marks up close. He brings that same eye to a photograph, a brand, or a screen.

His path has always been creative and service-minded — early studies in directing and design, apprenticeships and freelance work, and a long career in advertising and design — some fourteen years of it in agency and media environments — that led to Creative Director, running small businesses on the side and painting, illustrating and photographing the whole way through.

After a lifetime spent largely directing others, he made a deliberate choice during the 2020 lockdown to step back into making things himself. In 2026 he returned to full-time freelance, working across disciplines and exploring what AI-assisted tools can add — convinced that, as those tools mature, every creative will end up working across crafts rather than only directing them.

Faith, family, and creativity sit at the core of everything he makes. Art runs through the Viviers family across generations — his daughter carries that same impulse forward. His paintings are held in private collections across South Africa and abroad; he is represented on Saatchi Art and welcomes commissions, collaborations, and enquiries.

I am a South African fine artist and lifelong creative working in acrylic and mixed media. For me, making art is therapy; I create to express myself, and in doing so I also find myself. Faith, family, and creativity sit at the core of everything I make.

I've always painted what catches my eye and won't let go. That image that sits somewhere between the real and the heightened, the everyday seen in a way that somehow feels like a sign.

My work draws from the Realist and Pop traditions, but my influences reach further. Chinese brushwork taught me about economy and intention, how a single mark can carry weight and direction, as well as a fascination with Rembrandt's use of light. Sequential art taught me about pacing and visual narrative, how one image leads the eye into the next. I bring all of these sensibilities into paintings that are, on the surface, still and singular.

I stepped away from showing work in galleries for about a decade, but coming back to painting during the pandemic reminded me why it matters. Some things you can put down for a while and pick up again and find they've been waiting for you, and never really left.

That gap wasn't empty. Through those years I was building a career in advertising and design, work I still do under waltviviers.com, and somewhere along the way the same restlessness that puts me in front of a canvas started showing up in code, and more recently in AI-assisted tools. I don't experience these as separate lives. A painting has to hold up from across the room and reward you up close; a well-built interactive piece works the same way, there's a shape you take in at a glance, and detail that only shows itself once you start touching it. Faith, family, and creativity are still the core of everything I make, whether the tool is a brush or a build.

Making art is something my family has done for generations, and I see that same instinct in my daughter. It tells me this isn't just what I do; it's who we are.

Being self-taught and guided by my family has shaped how I see things. I didn't just learn the rules first. I also learned their philosophies, which means I've had to figure out what actually matters to me: presence. Paintings that hold their own in a room, that reward the time you give them (for both the creator and the observer).