Biography

A full time visual artist or painter/printmaker working in mixed media at my home studio on the slopes of Devil's Peak, Cape Town.
A born South African, I settled here 25 years ago after many years in Johannesburg and love my home and its natural setting. From as early as I can remember the beauty of the natural environment of rural farmlands around Durbanville that ignited a creative spark and led me to paint and draw. I spent my youth in a beautiful old Georgian styled homestead set in a wild, verdant garden in the center of the village in the 50's and 60's. My dear parents were both active participants in the town and always encouraged my many creative ventures into ballet, theatre, piano lessons, crafts and ultimately the solitude of painting.
At school I won a prestigious Santam Youth art competition in 1968. After which I spent five years searching for what I really wanted to do, so I worked in a variety of design fields from cosmetics to interior design and printing before deciding to enrolling at Michaelis Art School as a mature student in 1978. Here, I was awarded the Irma Stern scholarship to complete my MFA for which I produced a series of hand screen-printed public posters, that were deemed to be politically contentious at the time as they exposed relevant collected racist imagery in everyday life during the apartheid era in South Africa in the 1980's.

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.”
- Lucian Freud

Statement

Today, I use a wide variety of media and apply many unconventional found mark making implemen ts and techniques that add an intuitive and spontaneous feel to my work. I am in constant search for new ways to add to the immediacy of my method, filled with complex layers and lots of energy. My style has evolved from my early, collage representational printed graphics into the more non- figurative abstract, gestural form of expression. My inspiration still comes from the beauty in wide open spaces and the natural environment of my immediate environment in Cape Town.

I often juxtapose my earlier interest in local, contemporary imagery with that of a deepening concern for the natural environment.

My techniques today are expressive and filled with complex layering. I combine my strong sense of space with the formal elements of colour, textures, organic shapes and gestural lines drawn from my experience in nature. My recent paintings and monoprints are intuitive expressions of this experience and are mostly non figurative and allow the viewer their own interpretation.