Philippa Graff

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

Snapshots taken of my surroundings and unexpected nuances in my space, are the ideas I use to capture the intimacy of my life. These are the sources for my composition in my artworks. Contemporary reality reflected through the media, and the domestic reality in my personal world, are juxtaposed, to form objects and words in my painting.

For me, a headline, a caption or a statement may shift from its original context and move into my awareness with new significance. The text is partnered with objects of my world, objects that are both functional and those that are purely aesthetic.

Work

HONOURING DOMESTICITY – 2011/12

– represents a sold painting

Click on the paintings to view in full

DRUG BUST

DRUG BUST

1000mm x 700mm
Oil on canvas with collage
2011/2012


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These words set up new and surprising meanings through the play on their ambiguity. Arbitrary shapes float on the picture surface, creating the unexpected.

Central to this work is the painterly process, the possibility that oil painting has of bringing into existence or of wiping away – akin to the thought process. The continuous creating and obliterating nature of the medium, the potential for the medium to generate ideas and the erasure through layering and over painting, resonates deeply with me. Colour and texture, intrinsic to the objects that I have chosen to have in my personal space are transferred into my paintings through the use of paint that I manipulate to form objects. Words splatter over the surface, pun and satirize the objects.

Here I honour domesticity and raise it to another level of consciousness, hoping to delight and amuse and enlighten my viewer.

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