TALITA STEYN
Artist Biography
Talita Steyn is a South African contemporary artist living and working from her home studio in Wilderness in the Western Cape. Working across oil painting, charcoal and sculpture in clay and plaster resin, her practice explores the mysterious and often intimate encounters between humanity and nature. She studied Fine Art at the University of Pretoria before choosing to leave after her third year in search of broader life experience. Following a period of travelling and working abroad, she returned to South Africa, completed a degree in nursing and, in time, found her way back to art.
For Talita, this unconventional journey became fundamental to finding her own artistic voice. Her early art education gave her technical knowledge, but she felt she had not yet accumulated the life experience needed to understand what she wanted to express. Years later, during a particularly fulfilling period of her life overseas, the desire to create gradually returned. When she eventually committed herself to art full-time, she did so with a deeper understanding of the connection between creativity and her own experience of the world.
Talita’s work inhabits a space between the physical and the unseen. She is drawn to moments that resist easy explanation - experiences of beauty, nostalgia, synchronicity and wonder that are felt more readily than they can be described. Her predominantly figurative work becomes a visual reference to this inner landscape, attempting to capture something of what she describes as the space beyond the veil between the seen and unseen worlds.
Her creative process is intuitive and often begins with a seemingly random image, memory or visual reference that carries an inexplicable emotional pull. In sculpture, she gathers and combines references until she finds the gesture or expression that embodies the feeling she is searching for, allowing clay to reveal the form in three dimensions. In painting, she works with her own photographs and collages before translating them onto canvas.
Light is a recurring fascination within Talita’s paintings, both as a physical phenomenon and as a carrier of atmosphere. Nature, animals, raw emotion, life and death, love and the tension between opposites continually inform her work. She is particularly drawn to moments in nature whose beauty feels almost impossible to contain, and to the challenge of translating that fleeting experience into something tangible.
Talita has exhibited in galleries across Gauteng and the Western Cape and is represented by Art@Africa. Her 2023 exhibition Tales from the Wood reflected her enduring fascination with nature and the mysterious connections she finds within it. Through painting and sculpture, Talita continues to explore the places where reality, memory and imagination meet, creating works that invite viewers to recognise something deeply personal within experiences that cannot always be explained in words.
Artist Statement
I make art as a way of expressing things that are difficult to confine to the spoken word. My inspiration often begins with a moment or impression that fills me with an immediate sense of beauty or nostalgia and a need to somehow preserve that experience before it disappears.
My work is a visual reference to my inner world, where feelings and sensations often communicate more clearly than words. I am drawn to things that puzzle and mystify me, and my work usually takes a figurative form with one foot in the physical world and the other in the unseen.
My process is intuitive. An image, memory, expression or gesture may unexpectedly capture my attention and become the beginning of a work. With sculpture, clay allows me to search for the form until I reconnect with the emotion behind it. With painting, I experiment with photographs and collages to find the atmosphere I want before translating it onto canvas.
I am inspired by the magic in life - the things that cannot be rationalised or neatly placed into a box. Nature, animals, raw emotion, love, life and death, and the bittersweet tension between opposites continually draw me back. I am fascinated by light and by those moments of beauty that feel almost too immense to contain.
My journey back to art has been slow and gradual, and I feel in many ways that I am still only at the beginning. I have learnt to trust the strange pull towards the things that move me and allow them to lead the work. I hope that somewhere within these deeply personal explorations, another person may recognise something equally personal to themselves.
