Talita Steyn is a full- time artist living and working from her home studio in Wilderness in the Western Cape.

Her art mediums are oil, charcoal and working with clay and casting in plaster resin. She studied Fine Art at the University of Pretoria but discontinued her studies a er her third year, wanting to gain more diverse life experience. After her traveling and working abroad, she returned to South Africa where she studied a degree in nursing before she returned to art full me.  

The themes in her work generally deal with the mysterious and in mate meetings between humans and nature, where it becomes hard to capture specifics in words – her work enables to capture something of her personal experience of what lies beyond the veil between the seen and the unseen world – the world of mysticism, the sacred and inexplicable synchronicities.   

Talita’s work has been exhibited at various galleries in Gauteng and the Western Cape province. She is one of the represented artists at Art@Africa gallery who has a venue in Cape Town as well as Franschhoek. Her most recent exhibition, “Tales from the Wood”, held in November 2023 at the Art@Africa Gallery was inspired by nature and certainly exhibited her love for nature. 

I make art, as a way to express things that are hard to confine to the spoken word.  

My inspiration usually comes from moments or impressions that fill me with an immediate sense of beauty and nostalgia, and the need to try and capture something of that experience in a visual form, the same way we try to hold onto a dream to tell someone as quickly as possible, while simultaneously feeling it evaporate into a lost memory.  

My art serves as a type of visual reference to my inner world where feelings and sensations communicate more than words – it’s empty to grasp and document the things that puzzle and mystify me. My art usually takes a figurative form with one foot in the physical realm and the other in the unseen world.  

My process is an intuitive one usually set in motion by a random visual reference that for some reason sticks out with a message for me, perhaps from my unconsciousness or a poignant memory. For sculptures I would then find as many references as possible that incrementally come closer to the essence of what it represents to me. This process would involve different combinations of reference or trying to recapture an expression or a gesture that – in my mind or memory – summarizes the message. I find working with clay allows me to ‘find’ the form and let the emo on reconnect with me in a 3-dimensional form.                          

For paintings I like to experiment with photos I have taken myself, or collages I create, to find the feeling or atmosphere I am trying to express, thereafter I translate that into a cohesive whole on the canvas. I have

been fascinated by the different incarnations and effects of light, and how to translate that into a 2dimensional surface in paint. I have by no means come close to capturing it successfully and is something I keep feeling drawn back to. 

When I studied art, directly after school, I learnt about different techniques and modalities, but nothing about what it means to be an artist. I did not understand how to ‘be’ in the world as an artist, how to refuel myself or how to keep my lines of inspiration open, I didn’t know how to find my own narrative. I had very little life experience and even less to say with my art. I ended up feeling all squeezed out like an empty toothpaste tube and abandoned my studies at the end of my third year. It took years before I felt the need to create art again, and it only happened as a byproduct at a very happy me in my life when I was living overseas and finding my way back to myself.   

It would only be around 10 years later that I came full circle, back to art, this me ready to create full me having now connected the dots between creating and my metaphysical experience of life.  

It has been a slow, gradual process of immersing myself into this way of being, into feeling my way into what it means to ME to be an artist. I feel like I am only at the beginning of that chapter, late blooming for sure, but it is here and it’s amazing, I would not exchange it for anything.  

Inspiration 

I am inspired by the magic in life, by the things that blow our minds and cannot be rationalized or filed neatly into a box. Raw emotion and beauty found in the most unlikely places. I am inspired by life and death and the bitter-sweet tension between those two sides of the same coin. I am inspired by non-duality and the unseen world, and the idea that random strangers could recognize something deeply personal and synchronistic in my work. I am inspired by the animal kingdom and scenes in nature that are so awe inspiringly beautiful that it is too big to contain, and my heart wants to burst with the attempt. I am inspired by love in all its strange and often unexpected guises.     

Some painters who blow my mind:  Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Lars Elling, Adrian Ghenie and Alexandra Levasseur. 

Sculptors whose works I adore:  Les Deux Garcons, crystal Morey, Kate MacDowell, Bruno Walpoth and Willy Verginer. 

Rumi - “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” 

BROWSE MY COLLECTION