Short Artist Statement; Leon Jansen van Vuuren
I am a self-taught artist with a natural predisposition for emotional and dramatic images. My art – even when done for clients, reflect my instinctive draw towards the conflict between light and dark. I don’t just draw a picture – I tend to feel it and let it flow onto the page with all the emotions that come with it. My pieces evoke a feeling of dee
p thought and I try to bring across the very emotion that inspired the picture. My style is compared to photo-realism and are in some cases mistaken for photo’s – which is part of the goal of my work. I try to bring an emotion to bare and then combine it with the sudden realization that the work in front of the viewer is not simply a photo, snapped by a mechanical object, but a piece of an artist’s soul, forever imprinted on a page or a canvas. This is the feeling that I work for – the feeling of surprise and delight, combined with a strong connection to the subject matter of the work. As a recent example – I drew hands holding a rope in charcoal, “The Struggle”, it portrayed the everyday struggle of holding onto life, a very dark message that left the viewer feeling perhaps distraught, but once the realization set in that this was not a photo and was a piece of art, the dark message was now combined with a feeling of surprise and delight. My current commission work has prevented further expansion on my personal project, stated above, but I have a calendar schedule for my work and have planned well ahead for the future of this project.
