In the world of defining principles, I am a 41 year-old white woman who teaches Visual Art to high school kids, is married, has two kids and goes to church on a Sunday. I also drive a station wagon and have two cats.
In the world beyond that I am an unfolding process driven by instinct to record my experiences on canvas, paper, film, the internet, my phone, in words or whatever else is close by.
Because Life is not static and defined, because most of what we experience is still not understood, because the nature of being is about observing the coming into being, my art is a process and a sum of many parts.
There are certain things that become evident from a distance (like the fact that the Universe is expanding):
My work deals with the transcendent and abstract. There is nothing overtly political about my art. At all.
My work is deeply personal and therefore completely Universal.
There is a searching for beauty and order underlying all the seeming chaos
I really love making Art.
I paint as an instinctual compulsion. I make art because my being requires it as much as breath and sustenance. I make art because the Inside needs to be manifest Outside.
Influences (chronological)
Claude Monet
Mark Rothko
Cleone Cull
William Kentridge
Carl Jung
Henry Corbin
Cy Twombly
The world as It comes to me in whispers and full-on assaults
ART of all kinds.
Education
1993-1997 B.A. Rhodes University
1998-2000 DipFA NMMU
2006 PGCEd UNISA
Exhibitions
2001 Solo Exhibition (as Lushan Mansell) at the BAT Centre, Durban.
2002-2004 Represented by the Elizabeth Gordon Art Gallery, Durban
29 May-8 June 2015 Kaplan Art Festival, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg
Public Art Making Events
13 June 2015 Confronting the Blank Canvas with May Wentworth, Arts on Main, Johannesburg.
Work
2004-Present Visual Art Educator
So What Happened ?!
The world has become accustomed to the predictable, the controlled, the easily defined. The market economy expects consistency and conformity. I was too young for too long to settle into that.
I needed more time to experiment, to learn, to grow and stretch myself as an artist, as a woman, as a South African trying to define myself with a nation doing the same. How could I settle for one mode of expression?
And I needed to pay the rent, feed myself…. And then I married and had babies; my Opus #1 and 2, who demanded all my creative energies for years and then, when I was ready to emerge I got asked: where have you been?
I have been alive: living, teaching, learning, growing, finding, choosing, loosing, running, hiding, trying, hoping, struggling, making, giving up and then getting up again.
I am Here now. I am settled in a voice, a handwriting, a visual text that describes, evokes, incites and illustrates a reality that I can create and call My Art.
My Art
Painting is a meditative, magical process. I relate to the uncomfortable emotions and sensations that create tears in our fabric and I paint what is revealed in these tears.
My work is created in three categories of sizes.
My small paintings are Prayer Books: intimate treasures that contain images of deep, archaic myth to inspire contemplation and transcendence.
My mid-sized paintings are Catharsis: expressive surfaces filled with emotions anchored by icons expressing ideas and/or counterpoints which are the source of the emotional build-up.
My large paintings are Altar Pieces: they are the altars at which I sacrifice my biggest fears and desires.