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After the Rain

After the Rain is a series of small paintings of some of the mushrooms that sprouted on my property in Pretoria after months of unusually heavy rain at the beginning of 2021. I carefully lifted the fruiting bodies out of the ground with some of the soil and mycelium intact and photographed them in my studio.  I then attempted to capture their translucent fragility in oil paint on canvas. 

View Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards 2021 catalogue

Ducks in a Row

The theme of museum bird specimens stems from my lifelong fascination with birds and museums. Both birding and collecting can be seen as a search for meaning, since these activities are methods of connecting with, making sense of, and bringing order to a person’s surroundings. In this series of paintings, I consider the absurdity and futility of our search for knowledge and order. 

Each painting was created to the specific bird’s exact dimensions on a stretched canvas that was made by myself to fit these measurements. By using a scale of one to one, I comment on the notion of the absurd. A life-size map should, theoretically, be the most accurate representation of a thing, but, by its sheer enormity, becomes impractical. I focused on that which is supposed to illuminate, but instead becomes useless. 

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