Vanessa Berlein

After leaving art school in 1988, I produced mostly figurative paintings and looked to the work of Otto Dix, Egon Scheile, Alberto Giacometti and Odd Nerdrum for influence, I also looked at symbolism within different religions, especially Christian and Hindu, and took much inspiration from the Pre Raphaelites.

In 1994, I began to work with a variety of mediums and started making shrines, icons and lightboxes, In 1996 I moved to L.A for a year, and explored the mediums I was working with further. The prevalence of Hispanic religious iconography, ritual and symbolism I witnessed and a profound impact on me and I took part in a number of exhibitions where I showed my work, I also began writing more, poetry and short stories, some of which were published, and I began incorporating the writing in my work. When I returned to South Africa I produced a body of work for a show at the Area Gallery in CapeTown , incorporating photography, sculpture, print, painting, script and electric light, the show was SECRET/ICON. I also carried on producing paintings and took part in a few exhibitions in CapeTown.

In 1998, In went to live in The U.K. for 8 months, and while there, had the opportunity to see an exhibition of Mark Rothko's' paintings. Having grown up in South Africa when I did, I had had very little experience of Abstract painting, having only seen it in books, so viewing the paintings for real was astounding, the sheer size of the works was overwhelming, but the layering of paint and the depth he achieved within a seemingly single colour overwhelmed me. When I returned to Cape Town I began to experiment with layering pure colour glazes onto canvases, the process was incredibly seductive, but soon I started looking at industrial and building products to intersperse with the colour glazes. For inspiration I went back to my childhood and time spent exploring abandoned mineshafts at a mine my father owned near Pilgrims Rest in Mpumalanga.- the formations of rock and the veins of azurite and malachite that ran about the rock faces, together with an abundance of pyrites and quartz that we collected. So I started incorporating metal leaf and beeswax, resin and rust into my work, I also used my writing, which I scratched into surfaces. The scope was endless, and I worked mostly on a large scale. I continued to experiment with new mediums and the work evolved. The paintings were well received both locally and internationally and I exhibited extensively.

At the beginning of 2007, I decided to pull back on abstraction and turned back to figurative painting. In February I did "the Alice series" - a comment on my divorce. I have no idea how I got to go with Alice and the Rabbit, except that I woke one morning and felt absolutely compelled to do the series, I did draw in elements from some of my most recent abstract work, but the animated feel of the subjects was something I had never done before. I was approached by the Hout Bay Gallery in Cape Town to do an "Erotic Exhibition" for September, alongside Sarah Danes Jarrett and Claire Louise Walker. The ten paintings I did for the show were all done in pastel, oil, acrylic and beeswax. Once again, I turned to Egon Sheile, Alberto Giacometti and photography from the 20's and 30's for inspiration.

My latest body of work - "The Francis paintings" - is also a series of large scale figurative paintings, once again done mostly in oil, pastel and acrylic, but I have tried to push the boundaries since the Erotic series, and work with the concept of deconstruction.