Birth of Venus Painting

I am a multidisciplinary and visual artist, as well as a filmmaker and photographer. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Zambia, before coming to the Netherlands. After my graduation at the Rietveld Academy of Arts, I lived and worked in Paris, London and Rome, among other places. Painting and drawing, photography and film, writing and directing, are part of my activities. ‘I see in my work a search for purification and healing, leading me to an attitude of atonement towards myself and towards the world in which I create. I see my life as a work of art in a continuous process of resurrection and transformation. Everything I do springs from a deep feeling of vocation, driving me from within but guided by some other, call it divine, force, which I cannot help but listen to and follow with awe. In this sense I often feel like a messenger or tool for something beyond our perceivable reality. At the same time, this something is at my service and helps me walk the path that I am destined to follow.’ ‘The themes I stress are communication, interaction between people, processes of transformation, male and female identity and how these manifest themselves, and survival strategies. How do we persevere and evolve? What behavioural patterns do we develop for this?’ ‘The human figure is central in my work. It is represented as a playing, moving, thinking, suffering being, a micro-cosmos, carrying a secret world within, behind the skin. How does the human being, as a living structure, relate to the system, the world, the macro-cosmos by which it is surrounded? Contrast and contradiction are prominent in my work, like black and white, abstraction and narration, culture and nature, outside and inside, Europe and Africa, as are elements like geometry and expression, morality and instinct, and how they relate to each other.’ The texts above are quotes from my exclusive oeuvre book 'Into the Light - Cinematographic Choreographies and Visual Works' (Limited Edition) http://www.janicadraisma.com/into-the-light/