1 September 2022: First Thursdays Featured Artists

Meet some of our featured artists!

Lorraine Van Wyk 

Lorraine van Wyk’s artistic style is contemporary portrait photography combined with impasto style paint on her human canvas. From a young age, she demonstrated a natural propensity for fine drawing and painting. 

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, she left in the late 90s to travel as an international fashion model. She moved back to South Africa in 2015 and decided to focus her attention solely on her creativity and independent style as an artist rather than being the face of another’s vision. 

Largely self-taught and fine-tuned in many disciplines thanks to her involvement in the fashion industry and interest in museums and culture, she also attended short courses in various cities across the world. She developed her technique further as a photographer, stylist, set builder and painter. Lorraine sets her subjects up herself before painting and photographing them, aiming to execute the portrait within an hour. 

Her subject matter has ranged from archetypes to nations, to musicians, to conservation, and nature. She has a deep love of music and has collaborated with many musicians including commissioned album covers. 

Her work appears in private collections in England, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, and Germany.

Have a look here.

@plasticsareforever 

"Living so close to the sea in Kleinbaai, walking our dogs on the beach or the jeep track near the lighthouse, it is hard to ignore the awfulness of plastic pollution

It’s relentlessness…

As long as waves roll in, so will the plastic... this unsolicited companionship...

And so I pick it up, take it home, sort it by colour, size or shape…

Create something that will maybe give reason to pause… maybe give reason to look from a different angle… hopefully give reason to change… 

I would not have chosen plastic as an art medium…

I always picked up driftwood on the beach, and bone and shell… beach plastic chose me and it’s taken some time for me to find my creative feet… 

It’s not that I’m trying to find beauty in plastic…

Simply that if I had that single thought at the beginning of my plastic journey, then so can others…"