Santjie Viljoen

In 2022, after a period of deep anxiety and depression, I picked up a paintbrush and returned to something I had loved and lost. I did not return to painting because I had a plan. I returned because I was desperate for stillness, and somewhere in the layering of colour and light on canvas, I found it.
What happened in that studio surprised me. The act of mixing colour, of chasing the warmth of late afternoon light across a mountain face or the cool shift of an ocean at dusk, did something to my body that nothing else had managed. It quieted me. Science would later give me the language for what I was experiencing — that immersion in natural light and colour actively soothes the central nervous system, lowers cortisol, restores the body to a state of calm it so rarely finds in modern life. But I had already felt it. The paintings were doing that work long before I could explain why.
This is what I want my work to do for you. Not to decorate a wall, but to change the quality of the air in a room. To bring something of the natural world — its light, its rhythm, its unhurried presence — into the spaces where you live. To offer your nervous system, quietly and without fanfare, a moment of rest.
That is why I paint. And that is what every...

I have no formal training other than the 2 years of afternoon art in high school. All my skills come from looking and absorbing images, paintings, pictures and while gazing at these, imagining how I would render these in paint. It brings me great joy to imagine and complete the process. My hope is that this joy is shared with all who view my work.