TAY
STUDIO 5
OUT
THERE

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STYLE
When I returned to South Africa in 1995, a common general assumption towards abstract art was that, ‘beauty in art was simply a matter of not being so stylistically abstract.’ That was bad news for me.  At that time, realism as a genre was definitely king. Changing this narrow-minded attitude was my stirring challenge in life. I began to further refine my techniques and broaden my approach with colour, materials and experimentation on unconventional surfaces. Mostly things I found on my strange quest, like a window or an old piece of flooring.  After a year of building a body of work, I started pushing my art into galleries for more public reaction. 

  Style refers to the consistent qualities and features
that link my different works together.

  Viewers began looking beyond the abstract nature of my work and responded emotively to the expression the painting as a whole gave. This was the result I needed to move forward. People appreciated my use of colour and therefore, appreciated my abstract forms. In my opinion the key to beauty is colour, not just subject matter. Every painting has to have some colour, even if it is subtle. Colour became the pre-dominant and most recognizably exciting element to my unique painting style.

  Experimenting with combinations of colour, by building layer after layer onto the canvas or highlighting and enhancing certain elements within a work is what turns me on. The abstraction of elements allows me to be more imaginative; allowing a freedom of individualistic interpretation.

  There is absolutely no one way to describe my work.  It’s not what I paint that is important to me, but how I paint.  My style is what makes my art different from other artist’s and ultimately what makes my art worth collecting.  

PHOTOGRAPHY AND COLLAGE

BODY TWISTER

  Oil and Photographic Collage on Canvas
Collaborative work with Ben Chowney

  Upon our initial contact with other humans, people label each other by how we physically look to each other upon meeting.  At these daily contacts we literally consciously and subconsciously evaluate body parts to get an answer and a feeling to carry on developing relationships with each other.  It is indeed subconscious stereotyping that is inherent in us as animals. The game of Body Twister illuminates the light hearted point that our reality of physical assumptions is futile when it comes down to predicting a winner of the game.  How did you score? In practice the work expresses that the body is beautiful, telling and stirring, and that it is how we play by the rules and accept the dichotomy of the outcome that determines our destinies.

1315 - BIOGRAPHY (TAY'S STUDIO)  - 57cm x 28cm

1364 - THE ARTIST'S HAND - 40cm x 50cm

TABE 041 - FACTORY - 70cm x 70cm

 
1222 - IT'S A SIN - 150cm x 180cm
SOLD

IT'S A SIN

This work addresses the stereotyped roles of women as partner, wife, mother, and nurturer. Not all women (including myself) are reluctant to perform these societal duties, but it can not be refuted that from being born as a female, society has already placed on woman the immense responsibility to conform to certain societal rules.  Some of these rules dictate how we dress and beautify ourselves, how we pursue an appropriate mate, who our mate is in terms of career and income, when to and how we marry our mate and ultimately how we propagate the human race by creating as many children we can afford with our mate.  Add a few rules of conduct from religious and family values and you have a woman’s role bound by such complexity of duty that it is almost impossible to commit some sort of social sin.  Of course one could abstain from these overbearing and impossible rules, but then there is risk of being stereotyped as a social deviant, a village outcast and what’s worse being placed under the label of ‘disgruntled feminist.’

COME HERE OFTEN?

  In society, I believe that women are seen as sexual objects. In defense of men, it’s not always their fault that as sexual objects, a woman’s sexuality is misunderstood and therefore exploited and abused. Society, (both women and men) has willingly dictated the aesthetic standards of beauty and sex as can be seen through the multitudes of blatant stereotypes depicted in film, television, advertising, fashion design, cosmetics etc. The general thrust from society seeing a woman as an object of sexual submissiveness; is that an object can be bought, unwrapped and consumed.  However, one thing is apparent about the advancement of modern mankind when it comes to their objects, that if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t meet expectations, if it breaks through misuse, you can always get a replacement as long as you still have the receipt.

FISSION SELF

This collection is about being a woman in the new South Africa.  The work focuses on stereotypes, forced roles and the barriers that exist for women, (sexually, intellectually, marriage and motherhood, etc.), in order to establish their own independence and determine their own destiny in a modern, male dominated society.  The cathartic effect is for both women and men to ‘let go of boundaries’, by not letting others stereotype you, developing your own voice and expression by not playing gender roles for the rest of your life.  To be free in a new democracy.  

EGGS

My early work experimentations dealt with surrealistic subjects in other worldly landscapes.  Subsequently, a lot of symbolic eggs appeared and stayed with my work for awhile. I was interested in the pure, simple and smoothness of the egg form which seemed so out of place when placed within a natural environment.   Symobolic of life, rebirth, and change my eggs stood alone and sterile in unrelated landscapes as if they came from somewhere else. The irony and contrast of the subject facinated me, so I painted a bunch of them.

134 - ORANGE EGG PAINTING - 26cm x 41cm 

THE ARRIVAL SERIES

My whole process in the creation of these works is different to the way I usually work.  I masked over the underlying areas and what remained were the layers from before, in very definite shapes, unlike my other paintings in which I mask over certain areas, but with atmosphere, rather than the definitive shapes obvious in these works.  The result is far more definite. 

  In this experimental series, I worked with a focus on negative and positive, destroying areas or covering areas and creating or building other areas – the result being almost based on chance, but also through this discovery of sorts a very structural composition emerged. The painting technique, creates and illusion of  collage cut-outs instead of painted works.

  These paintings are about building and destroying, about trying to not be precious and breaking away from the organic qualities evident in many of my works.

  I see them more as an exercise in positive and negative truths than anything else.  They are about revealing and concealing, balance and structure, absence and presence.

FLOORS
 

The off-cut canvas on my studio floor gathers the droppings that fall from the paintings on my wall where I work.  These are preserved, in a sense, as a shadow, a footprint of what happens whilst I create. 

  In some ways my floors tell their own story.  The drops of paint falling on the floor form a testament of the colours I have been using in my art up to when I sign and date the floor piece. 

MATERIALS

 Primarily, most of my paintings are done with a variety of oil, enamel and acrylic paints on canvas or board.  I try not to limit my choice of materials to only conventional materials, solely because I believe strongly in the exploration and combination of different mediums. I also like to have fun once in a while, discovering new possibilities that various mediums have to offer.

  I often make use of, ink, pastel, pencil, mixed media and things that I have found.  This heightens the intensity and mystery of what I do. The contrasts within the various mediums I use, often creates a more dynamic work with many different qualities to it.

  The possibilities of materials are endless.  I may paint on, and in combination with, almost anything; canvas, paper, collage, wood, fabric, glass, metal, plastic, resin, rock, bone, whatever speaks to me at the time.  

567
WOODBLOCK COLLAGE
22cm x 22cm

SOLD

Earth Cores
Found in the Hottentots Holland Mountains
Western Cape, South Africa

Materials: Mixed Media and Oil Paint on Geological Cores - Table Mountain Sandstone, Granite, Shale and Quartzite - set in Crete Stone and Wood.

I have a secret passion for geology and it was impossible to ignore the possibilities of using these cores in my art.  I found them in a beautiful old abandoned building in the Hottentots Holland Mountain range near Cape Town. The building they were in had burnt down and the cores lay scattered all over the ground.  Forgotten years ago, their original purpose is a mystery to me, perhaps the “powers that be” were looking for gold or diamonds in the Cape!

Contrary to their original use, my rationale for embracing these cores artistically is the following: the Earth Cores, as portrayed through my personal vision, connect humanity with the changing pulse of the earth.  

LOOKING GLASS

Many of these works are just fragments of pieces of my thoughts, little ideas and experiments that I collect and preserve.  The variety of genres and materials are what make them unique, even though they all belong to a single body of glass box works.  My ultimate aim is to strive for variety and individualism in each one of them.

The distortion of the work by reflection of light through the glass, gives the works a sense of movement and of being alive and changeable. 

TABE SMASHED

These works question the notion of what art is.  The very fact that the glass itself is in fragments defies the notion that art should be displayed pristinely behind glass in a frame in the traditional manner of presentation.  The shattered glass also comments on the fragility of art.

 The broken-ness has its own beautiful, unpredictable quality of reflection that distorts and changes the work beneath.  In a sense, it heightens the movement as it reflects the work in different ways and changes what we see as we move in front of it.

SILVER JAPAN

These works were a set of collages that I created out of shipping crate walls when I first moved to South Africa.  They are infact the very shipping crates that I moved all my things in from America.  

I used a lot of personal materials in the work like old sketches,  artifactual keepsakes, and some really interesting paper I used to collect.  Why throw away perfectly good thick card board surfaces right? 

These works marked the beginning of my pass time to collect junk as a source of materials for future works.

PLASTIC PROMISE

  The Plastic Promise Series initially originated out of my love for the play of light on different surfaces and my fascination with attempting to create a translucent effect in a painting.  The idea of a surface that could be manipulated in such a way that the work seems to have movement, sparked my interest.  As with my works in which I use glass, I wanted to create a series of works that has a life of their own.  As the natural light changes throughout the day and as the paintings are exposed to various forms of electric lighting, the work changes and seems to be a succession of different paintings throughout the day or night.

With the work “New Plastic Multi-dimensions”, I took this concept one step further.  The painting consists of a frame holding five different paintings, all painted separately.   Changing the order of the paintings in the frame or taking some out, changes the overall effect completely. 

  In a way, with this series, I succeeded in creating “living art”.  

EDGE OF ENAMEL

I have experimented with enamel paint for years because I love what the material can produce in terms of effect and emotion on canvas.  The paint is not as easy to work with as it seems.  What may seem a simple splat  or spill is what happens spontaneously during the time I create them but I have thought about what and where I want to spill and splat and what positive and negaive forms I want to create.   You can't undo the paint once it is on the surface therefor when I get it right,  they are works that are pure and  powerful, as they leave the unnecessary out.  

Unlike the forms in my oil paintings, which often merge into one another and are more atmospheric in nature, the forms in these works  are very definite in their colour  with the painted image clearly delineated.  The enamel paintings, therefor  are bold pure and confident, there is no in-between, what you see is what you get,  they do not lie.