Pete Schuil
The artist

Pete Schuil

Pilot · Artist

For more than fifty years, Pete Schuil's office has been the cockpit. A commercial pilot with over 8,000 hours, he has spent a lifetime flying low over the rivers, escarpments and shorelines of southern Africa — landscapes most people only glimpse, and that many who once called this place home can no longer easily reach. He lived three years on the shores of Lake Kariba, and has returned to these places by air his whole life.

Each painting begins with a place Pete knows intimately: the storms rolling over Lake Kariba, the dhows resting on the sands of Vilanculos, the Chimanimani Mountains he hiked as a teenager and now flies above as his day job. Many are drawn from his own photographs, taken from the air or from a lodge porch at the end of a flying day; others come from memory — places held so close they needed no reference at all.

His paintings are what he brings back from those flights: the view from his office, set down on canvas. For those who carry these landscapes in memory, a print on the wall is a way of keeping the view — and an invitation, for anyone who feels the same pull toward these places, to keep it too.

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The collection