Tamasa Gallery is proud to present

‘One Sunday Afternoon‘

by Karla Nixon

Artist Statement- One Sunday afternoon

My work engages with the long-standing tradition of landscape painting, drawing inspiration from the rich and varied environments of my hometown, Durban, South Africa. Through the deconstruction and reinterpretation of these landscapes, I delve into their physical components and the complex narratives they embody, bridging past artistic legacies with contemporary perspectives.

There is a fundamental human inclination to preserve and hold onto the beauty of natural landscapes we encounter. We aim to capture their grandeur, stillness, and lushness—an impulse historically, within the context of South Africa, fulfilled through meticulous oil paintings by artists such as Jacob Pierneef(1886–1957), Maggie Laubser(1886–1973), and Irma Stern (1894–1966)*. Today, with the convenience of phone cameras, anyone can and will inevitably freeze a stunning moment—a beach, a mountain, or a sunrise—with a click of a button.

With the obvious keenness for these images, landscape painting has largely fallen out of favour in contemporary art. This peeked my interest and inspired my own exploration of this genre. This led me to question what constitutes a landscape, what keeps people going back and photographing these natural beauties.

I became increasingly interested in landscape, not as a scene that needed to be captured or preserved. I attempted to take a slightly more analytical approach, viewing these scenes as dynamic entities composed of elements that evoke emotion and awe. I sought to break it down into its essential parts: the physical elements (land—grass, trees, fields; mountains—distant textures and colours; sky), the visceral response (the emotional impact of encountering these views), the sensual experience (primarily through sight and touch, with a focus on texture), and the interaction (how we experience the natural beauty and our desire to capture and record the beauty we experience).

In my exploration, “deconstruction” became both a conceptual and physical approach. I disassembled landscapes into their core elements, further distilling them into colour and light, texture, and movement. My process involved creating paintings, tearing them apart and reassemble the fragments into new, imagined landscapes, as the specific landscapes where no longer important. These artworks, though sometimes loosely based on the landscapes around me, are reconfigured into highly textured, often abstracted artworks. The torn fragments serve as metaphors for how we experience and remember moments—fleeting yet impressionable—each small piece contributing to a larger whole.

Ultimately, my work challenges the traditional notion of landscape painting by shifting focus from mere representation to a more experiential and fragmented exploration. Through the physical act of tearing apart and reassembling materials, I aim to capture the fleeting nature of how we perceive and remember landscapes—distilled into moments of colour, texture, and form. Rather than offering a fixed scene, these abstracted works invite viewers to contemplate their own relationship with nature, encouraging them to think about the shifting, layered, and often fragmented ways we engage with and understand the natural world.

*Note:
Landscape in South African art history have been steeped in problematic political ideology specifically when challenged by postcolonial and post structural lenses, something which is important to mention, but this is not what am I am interested in, or draw parallel two. I am interested in the artworks birth, before it gets appropriated into political ideology. The artist, like an everyday armature photographer taking a snap of the picturesque scene while on a hike, is capturing a representation, idealised or not, of the scene before them. Perhaps it is fair to say I lean towards a more phenomenological or as John Wylie (2007:162) terms it a “non-representational” approach to landscapes.

My deconstruction of the landscape, abstraction, and focus on individual object or element, aids in my attempt to remove ideology, and rather focus on the physicality of the scene and the individual experience.

References:
Wylie, J. 2007. Landscape. London: Routledge.
Lauwrens, J. 2022. NEW HORIZONS: (RE)VISITING VIEWS ON THE LANDSCAPE IN SOUTH AFRICAN ART. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361138519_NEW_HORIZONS_REVISITING_VIEWS_ON_THE_LANDSCAPE_IN_SOUTH_AFRICAN_ART (Accessed 2024)