"Vortex I" Painting

“I paint the things that makes me look twice.”


Across every painting, wildlife, figurative, travels, landscape. Kersten's work shares one quality: a single point of emotional truth surrounded by expressive energy. The elephant's eye. The lioness's gaze. The woman's smile. The gondola's reflection. Her brush and palette knife does the same thing in every piece, dissolves the world into texture and then crystallizes one moment of stillness inside it. That is her signature.

K. Kersten is a South African painter based in Johannesburg, working in various mediums. Her work moves across African wildlife, portraiture, landscape, and travel destinations, united by a single painterly instinct: find the one moment of stillness inside the chaos, and let everything else dissolve into texture around it.

That instinct expresses itself consistently in her technique. Using the brush and palette knife, Kersten builds surfaces of layered, directional strokes that give her paintings a physical presence and immediacy that rewards close looking.

Backgrounds break into expressive energy. The contrast between the loose and the precise is where her work lives.
She studied art through school in South Africa, graduating with a distinction, and has spent the years since exploring the medium in every direction it offers, drawing, oil, watercolor, and resin among them.

She is fascinated by nature and the effect of light, and by a simple, recurring observation: there is enormous beauty in the world, but it is so often overshadowed by the noise and harshness surrounding it. Her paintings are, in their way, a quiet argument against that, an insistence on finding and holding the beautiful thing anyway.

Painting from her Johannesburg studio, Kersten draws on the landscapes, wildlife, and human stories of Southern Africa and her travels. Each piece is a record of something that stopped her, and made her not want to look away.
Her originals are available through Saatchi Art, shipped directly from South Africa.