
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!
•Printmaking •Drawings •Paintings
DIGITAL ART
•The Lost City Series •Hat series •Flower series
PHOTOGRAPHY
•Landscape Photography •Animal Photography •Macro Photography
Elaine van Dyk hosts Printmakers and Printmaking and is a member of 1:1 Macro Photography (Limit: 2 posts per 24 hour period), A Class of Its Own, African Art and Photography, All That is Nature (Photography Only), Australian Native Orchids, Birds and Creatures of Flight, Fabulous Flowers, High Quality Animal Images - 1 Submission a Week, Landscape Photography, Nikon DSLR Users Group - 2 uploads per 24 hours, Only Orchids!, Pelicans, PixElations - The Art of Photoshop, The Birds, The FENCE group, The World Is Us, Wild Nature Photography & Writing and Works On Paper.
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Marlene Dietrich’s voice oozed seductively from the speakers. Gracie held the soft cloth of her dressing gown around her neck and closed her eyes. She hummed the words as she swayed gently to the …
Our ears have been alert all night for sounds of a hunt, a kill, but so far nothing – just the constant loud grunting, not-quite-roaring, in the sandy, dry riverbed. We stand outside on the ver…
This was a magical place. A place he’d cherished as a child. He’d stumbled across it, trying to hide from his drunken father. Now, many years later, he’d returned. Lying here on his back, h…