Artists showcase the often unseen beauty

Renowned landscape artist and Mbombela resident, Karin Daymond, drew a crowd of all ages to the opening of her latest exhibition, Pattern and Path, at the White River Gallery on Saturday.

“Whenever I exhibit in the Lowveld, it comes naturally. I am aware of things that are close to me. The shapes are rounder and more organic and there are less straight lines,” Daymond said of her wide variety of paintings hanging on the gallery’s walls.

While enjoying a glass of wine and snacks, members of the public and fellow artists had many questions to ask the artist about her work and creative process. Daymond, who is quite a bit taller than most, answered them all with ease to oohs and aahs of appreciation from the audience. There were a couple of pieces which really stood out to the visitors and to Daymond herself.

Her favourite group of paintings is of lichen, a complex organism composed of fungus and alga which grows in branching, leaf-like forms on trees and rocks. It takes on many different shapes and forms.

“Some people don’t even know that lichen exists. It is unseen, icky and pretty at the same time. It is also kind of like the beginning of life. It is presumptuous to say, but we know when we see something primal or essential.”

She also spoke of the things that had inspired her on her travels, the coastline in Wales and Italy. It was her time in Sicily – when the European refugee crisis had recently hit the news and there were bodies washing up on the shore, African bodies – that Daymond started to think about what she would have taken with her as a refugee.

She thought of cloth, something which many African women carry with them to wear, to transport food from one place to another, to hold their babies to their back.

“Cloth takes on life in the water. That is what started the Adrift series,” she said.

All of Daymond’s paintings are devoid of human figures but many do have a sense that someone or something has moved through the scene.

She said her work process as an artist is not very easy but “it would be harder to not do it”. Marlize Meyer of White River Gallery joked about the height difference between her and Daymond.

“The hanging of the paintings was quite difficult,” she joked.

“I would, however, challenge every one of you to pass a piece of veld (or bush) and not think that Karin has been there.”

The Pattern and Path exhibition will close on March 27.