Illuminations Painting

Born 10 March 1954 Pietermaritzburg, Kwazulu-Natal. Currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. My work is concerned with change, decay, destruction and the passage of time. It also specifically deals with the vulnerability and recovery of nature. It is only over the last eight years that I have been able to paint full time, although I have been an active artist in many media since the age of nineteen as well as various periods of operating fringe galleries and facilitating art, poetry and experimental music events. I work in both abstract and realist modes, moving from one mode to the other keeps my attention focused and my vision fresh. Each mode or style of art-making enables me to express myself in the most appropriate way the artistic vision demands. However, over the past ten years, I have been concentrating mainly on abstraction using a variety of media including acrylics, oils, pastels, charcoal and screenprinting. From an early age I have been greatly influenced by Nature, both from a scientific and an aesthetic view, and have been aware of the destructive influence of human activity on the environment. One of my early art influences was the visionary artist and poet William Blake. The influence and inspiration for my present work comes directly from the simultaneous study of the French artist Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” and working and meditating in the garden. I was studying the painting and found the original plans for the actual raft online and built a scale model. I was fascinated by the grid, the way a grid was used as a life support mechanism and what that raft can represent conceptually. It led me to think of birds’ nests and at the same time, I happened to be doing a lot of trimming in the garden, ending up with piles of twigs, flowers, leaves and branches. The chaotic grid patterns that the branches formed, the idea of humankind shaping nature to conform to aesthetic ideas, the wastage and the whole question of ecology soon began to inform my art making. The grids are also a reminder of maps and the chaos of the layering of history on the landscape through wars and disasters. My study of World War 1 trench maps and comparisons with present-day terrain is used extensively in a number of interpretive works.