A Heart of Intuition Painting

BIO Jeanne Pfaff 203 Albert Road Woodstock, Cape Town Jeanne Pfaff : Expressionism, abstraction, figuration and raw material engagement in equal parts. Pfaff’s work, whether painting, drawing or sculpture, holds loosely onto a representational form mediated by memory, by desire, and by knowledge of the world, to create new forms that in their abstraction and incredible physicality inscribe her power as a woman and as a human. Inspired by abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Pfaff engages directly with and through the material aspect of her work, doing so in an open way that leaves the history of her process visible in the final work: All of her questions, false starts, corrections, and modifications, remain integral parts of the final composition, showing not only her power to achieve a resolved composition but, more importantly, her hard-won self confidence in exposing the complex negotiation that has led to the final work. Pfaff has little interest in planning the final outcome of a painting, rather working prolificly and relentlessly on multiple pieces till completion. The themes that Pfaff explores, whether through use of the landscape, figure or still life, are personal; they originate in significant and compelling encounters, inscrutable to the viewer. Yet, through her exuberant material engagement, and especially in her sensitivity to chance events on the surface, intuitive rather than calculated relations in colour and mark making, depart from their original world and open up to new readings. The completed works are energetic fields rather than contained images, full of bodily gesture, subconscious drive, pictorial cunning and fleeting mood, each seeming to be a small excerpt from a much greater whole – a permanent record of all the contradictions of our time and space. Pfaff’s arts education has been instinctual and ongoing. She has studied under the guidance of various established artists such as the Post Impressionist painter Nina Campbell-Quine, Ruth Levy, Reshada Crouwse and while living in New York she joined the Arts Student League. Pfaff’s greatest influence was her studies under Robyn Child (part of the pedagogical lineage of Walter Sickert) at Lydgate Art Research Center in Wiltshire where she studied for many years. Pfaff works in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa and is an associated artist with the Everard Read Gallery Johannesburg.