About Art-Cmp
I was born in Pretoria, South Africa in the late 1960s. There I grew up and eventually went to University in the mid 1980s where I studied, mostly part-time, Information Technology and Fine Art. Both of these fields went on to play major roles in my life.
During my Fine Art studies, my love of nature started to find expression and I was influenced by a number of international artist that broadly fall in the land art or site specific art categories. They include Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long and Robert Smithson. My final year work addressed themes such as mapping and maps, stones, weathering and erosion, geology, plants, grasses and water in three-dimensional works. Media included film, photography, drawings, cast elements, ceramics and steel.
However, the artistic side of me had to find other outlets in the next few decades as I focused on consulting in the IT industry. During this time I came to Germany for the first time and settled in the Munich area around eight years ago. Last year, the opportunity came along to make a change and I needed no convincing to return to a creative life.
Here are some examples of the work that influenced
me and of my own work during my studies.
Andy Goldsworthy’s
ephemeral works are poetic inserts into a quiet landscape. Surreal and fleeting, they continue to exist in photographs and books.
Robert Smithson’s
almost brutal and monumental scale forces one to take note. There is no escaping the massive scale, although it still maintains an elegance and rhythm that is hypnotic.
Influences
The images below are from the Cosmic Series. They are explorations in the landscape with fire and ice; fleeting moments of absolute quietness.
Sometimes the contrasts are harsh, light and dark, life and death; sometimes the images are meditative, undefined in space and time.
Study work
