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Escape from ... Escape to ... (available)
This was the first work I completed after a break of a few months, juggling a day job and an art career takes careful planning and discipline, both which I sometimes lack.
I was unsure how and in what form to re-start the process of creating. I had been clearing a section of my garden and on impulse scattered the cuttings on a new white canvas. I purchased a few cans of vibrantly coloured spray paint and employed the cuttings as stencils. The interesting shapes, vibrant hues and reversed out forms were quite intriguing and set me off on an energetic spurt of creativity.
This painting was quite a surprise to me, it almost painted itself. However, for every success there are a few I'd rather not share in public!
"Escape From ... Escape To ..." is a landscape of sorts, and it served me well in breaking back into a creative mind space.
Let It Blue ... The World (available)
This is a large acrylic work on canvas. It is very rewarding to be able room on a canvas to spread paint with so much space for colour to run freely.
The work is a vibrant contemporary piece with large open areas of intense cobalt blue, broken up by splashes of ochre and dripping green glazes. The work has a loose painterly style and leaves one staring into the depths of what could be a continent from afar, or a scene of mountain slopes with vegetation and dripping water.
The curious thing as always is that different viewers notice different qualities, shapes and forms. To me, this was clearly a landscape - to another it was our world as seen from space. Hence the double name , "Let it blue... The World".
Fullness (prints available)
This canvas was gifted to me by a friend and it previously sported a dark and broody (very kitch) painting. After a good white-washing it was ready to be transformed into something new.
The age that we live has many challenges and it is easy to give in and allow fear and anxiety to overpower us. However, every now and again I feel an exuberance of life that is hard to contain. That exuberance is reflected in the process my art-making. The visual vocabulary of composition, contrast, colour, texture, line and more start to tell a story on the canvas.
The size of the canvas was a bonus. Large colour fields have great emotive value and the material can run and flow unrestrained over the surface, it is an enormously pleasurable experience. What a gift it is to work on this scale, I can allow paint to spill and mix on the surface without restraint. Big paintings are unpractical in terms of average smaller home space they don't sell easily, it is a great reward when someone purchases a large work.
This painting is mostly acrylic, I used oil paint for the final highlights. Acrylics dry fast, a faster pace needs a quicker reaction time, with the result that the work often has a fresher feel.
This painting is a (very full) landscape work, reflecting a full life.
Inhale... Air (available)
Let It Breathe (available)
A Second Chance to Fly Series
The series titled “A Second Chance to Fly” was birthed when I made a commitment to produce a final body of work, a last and special series of small works, to celebrate 2021 before the year-end.
I started the process by rummaging through my shelves and selecting old, dusty pieces of art on paper. These pieces were unfinished, discarded, failed and relegated to the “recycling pile”. The work had all gone through the initial stages of art making which means that I had started applying base colours, some line-work and texture, but had not taken them to a final stage where they had a cohesive compositional identity.
My theme circles around the landscape of Piketberg and the mountains above it. This is a special area as it is where my mother grew up. Since her childhood many families have lived, married, given birth, grown up, moved away and been replaced by newer generations, yet the landscape has remained the same. I tried to convery a feeling of time passing and family connections to the land, flighty memories and lovely old stories.
The re-used, discarded, failed and abandoned artwork had become part something new, telling a different story. I used dried protea leaves as stencils over which I sprayed aerosol paint, this concealed or revealed certain parts of the recycled art. I allowed some of the original marks to remain, while creating new shapes and textures overlaying the old. Fresh interest and creativity had given the pieces a second chance as the half-finished works became new finished artworks.
My process is intuitive and finds its inspiration in the open spaces away from city life. What emerged in this creative process were flighty bird-like shapes. I decided to keep this as the visual theme for the series.
The paintings are smaller than my normal work, they are mounted on box frames and ready to hang. The work consists of twelve 20cm x 20cm works in oil on paper.
My art is for you, the viewer, the art lover, the one who wants an extra bit of joy and creativity in their home or office. My art is not complicated, it reflects my passion for creating and making, interpreting the workd around me. It is a visual journey, an experience into an alternate world, a break from reality if you will. My work is to be enjoyed and I hope to bring colour and positive creative energy into your space - wherever thet may be.
