Elaine van Dyk

Profile

City: Ringwood
Country: Australia

Joined: Feb 2007

Co-host of

I was born in South Africa. Growing up in such a culturally rich and diverse continent, with wildlife and natural places in abundance was a privilege. This, together with traveling and living elsewhere from a young age, taught me a deep appreciation for all life, and all natural places.

I love art and I love to create art. My work is basically a direct response to personal experiences of what I have seen or felt/feel. My favourite mediums are drawing and printmaking, although I do also experiment with painting.

Photography is a much more recently acquired obsession, and it is also the basis for many of my digital works. However, while I am now slowly experimenting with creative photography, in earlier years it was purely a form of information collection, together with sketches, as groundwork for ideas to be expressed in other mediums. The more skills I acquire in photography and digital manipulation, the more my perceptions of creating in digital format are evolving.

Subject dictates the medium I use. The ideas in my digital art are generally vastly different from the subjects in my drawings or printmaking artworks. When I draw or paint, or extend my drawing to a printmaking plate, I imagine the sensation of touching my subject, or feel it touching me, so that my fingers will transfer the harshness or delicacy of a line, the gesture or texture to the surface I’m working on. It’s a tactile as well as a visual process. Photography is obviously very different for me, as is digital art because I am physically separated from feeling the surface while I am capturing or creating the image.

I work full-time in an office and am also doing a creative writing course, so time for visual creative expression is extremely limited. Any time I do have in my little studio downstairs is very precious. Fortunately I have an understanding family – when Elaine is in her studio leave her alone!

TRADITIONAL ART