Painting
This year's paintings are mainly still life.
In a world of more pace and uncertainty than ever before, these paintings are way of finding a residue of the peace and contentment of childhood, of when life seemed more certain. They are of the various landscapes like the Karoo and the places we stayed on family trips, the endlessly open veld we rode through on our horses, in playing and making in my father’s workshops and the various other places stopped in or passed through that make me curious about what has gone before.
The paintings feature objects that carry the residue of memory... of the soil it rested on, of the history of the person that used it, memories of the person who was with me at the time of finding the object.
I find myself on isolated beaches, hiding out of the wind, watching the mist roll in over the stones that were in turn rolled by a powerful sea to the places they now find themselves. In that time of being still, one begins to observe things previously unnoticed and to feel and smell the place.
The feel of buttery oil paint as it is laid on thick, thinned with oil or scumbled over the underpainting never loses its appeal in creating rich surfaces. My training in painting has been with Karin Daymond and Ricky Burnett; intuitive teachers whose own love of paint showed me so much.
