Degrees of Separation Painting by Gabrielle Raaff

Painting: Ink on Paper.

This painting is part of a body of work called 'Trail' which references the almost 'out of this world' beauty found in a local green belt of her home town, Cape Town. Raaff's visual language in this particular series of works is a contemporary dialect of 18th Century English and Dutch landscape painters but she avoids easy representations of the real or pastoral scenes she encounters. Instead, she rearranges the parts of the whole to create emotive spaces at once beautiful, discordant and ominous. Working in watercolour, ink and water-based oil allows her to build up the painted surface through many layers of diluted pigment. Using this technique, the surface becomes something of a palimpsest, with the past luminously apparent in the finished work.