Natalie van Wyk Artist
Artist's Statement
I am a landscape artist working in the Romantic tradition where landscape becomes a metaphor for inner states as well as an expression of the numinous.
I love being alone in nature and am immensely drawn to a sense of beauty and of transience.
I work with soft pastel rather than paint. I prefer to make marks as opposed to brushstrokes. The fragility of the medium also attracts me. It's like painting with dust. I always work on Black paper. Allowing the image to emerge from the darkness is a meaningful part of the process for me.
My art is a vessel, a container for my inner life. I tell my stories as a way to heal. I am interested in archetypes and the mytho-poetic recesses of my psyche. I am interested in art as a language of the soul.
'Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.' Charles Baudelaire, 1846
'The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.' Caspar David Friedrich,' 1810