I’ve always felt a deep connection to the ocean and feel most alive when I’m near it.  Living in Switzerland, I missed the sea and so it was associated with nostalgia, longing, memories.  Now happily, I get to spend 3 months a year on the Cape Coast.

This is an open series which reflects my development well.   The early pieces in oil and cold wax medium were inspired by time spend on the coast in Iceland and Ireland. I then fell in love with line as witnessed in the more turbulent pieces.  Now, I'm back into simplicity ('the ultimate sophistication" said Da Vinci) . Quiet, restraint and mystery are my current preferences. 

A collection of moody atmospheric works. This started as a series of small work, but I've included later larger pieces which have the same mood, energy and colour palette. 

 I am a garden and plant-lover and enjoy being outdoors surrounded by plants and getting my hands dirty.  This is a collection of works inspired by plants, gardens, and the most especially, the colour green.  This is colour of life itself, it has an automatic calming effect, the eyes relax and we feel more tranquil and healthy. 

An open collection of artwork celebrating the weather - both real and emotional.  Coming from South Africa I love the dramatic seasonal changes in Europe and find my palette (and my mood) changing with the seasons. These are not descriptive works, rather they evoke memories, energies, feeling.

This body of work explores asemic writing -  loose gestural calligraphic line that resembles hand-writing but has no semantic  meaning. 

The origin of asemic writing goes back to Japanese and Chinese calligraphy.  It's been explored since the automatic writing of the surrealists, but abstract expressionist like Cy Twomby really made it popular. 

In this series, I explore the interplay between black not as absence but as a colour in conversation with another. Black is not  the dominant colour, but acts as an active presence. I think of it as a conversation between the two — at times their voices blend, at others one dominates.  Occasionally a third pipes in, or gets louder or quieter. Occasionally, I leave areas of white, introducing another voice. 

 

I spent many months in 2021/2 trying to capture the experience  of various pieces of music into 2-dimensional art. Evoking the mood, the energy,  the sense of time passing were my primary goals.  At the same the series helped me master a free gestural way of drawing with paint. 

At the end of all this experimentation and learning, I decided not to make this pieces public.  Many were too busy, too  restless and complex for my taste. It was not time wasted at all.  To make sense of how my work evolved, you need to see these seminal pieces. 

Loose gestural, at times calligraphic brushwork became a constant after this series.