AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANK AND LIZELLE KILBOURN: A PASSION FOR COLLECTING ART

WHAT IS YOUR MAIN MOTIVATION FOR COLLECTING ART? 

PURE JOY.

Insights into the private art collection of Frank and Lizelle Kilbourn who shed light on how their collection developed and what drives them as collectors. As husband and wife, avid collectors and art enthusiasts, they bought their first artwork in 1988 and now their beautiful home in Tamboerskloof is embellished with hundreds of works over thirty years later. An important art collection with over 1300 individual artworks, Frank and Lizelle explain their passion for collecting and documenting the histories of South African art.

Frank: It was actually Post University when we just started working and someone had a house exhibition in Pretoria. It was not only an exhibition, but it was also a sale – so long before short, we found ourselves with three paintings, and we collected quite organically, we didn’t start with an end goal in mind.

I think we quickly realised you can either have a reasonably good South African collection or a really mediocre International collection because the story that they tell is not necessarily our story, and I think one response to our works in a much deeper and intuitive way than to say, the historic works that are made internationally.

Lizelle: We were newly married and one Saturday we drove around our neighbourhood. We always loved many things – nature, properties and art was an emerging awareness. And then we happened upon a house sale, an auction, an auction of the contents of a house and one of the paintings there was a Volschenk, Jan Volschenk. And we loved the painting, we enjoyed it and we bought it there at the auction. But it was something that we valued, and that experience of course, that doing something together was quite special. And what I like about his work is that perspective; he really gets that right for me. You see the mountains and then in the foreground often aloes, so the detail of it. Well, I like that.

So it would be nice if one day our collection could be, you know if somebody takes a photograph of it, to be able to say that well this represents the best of what over various decades and so on, our artists could offer -but it is unattainable. 

Frank: As Lizelle said, we are in a way trying to tell the story of South African art through our collection, so you can begin and see how it meandered, reacted to what was happening in the rest of the world, and our artists in South Africa addressed the same topic in very different ways. 

So that story continues, we are very interested in contemporary art. 

Lizelle: The human capacity for innovation and for originality, well we can debate what is original, but for new things, new interpretations, new perspectives, new ways of looking that is almost as exciting as seeing the works themselves. It’s having that glimpse into the mind of the artist, seeing what artists are capable of.