Animals are my favourite motif. Franz Marc‘s work in this area was my initial inspiration although I never followed his very specific ideas on the meanings of colour (e.g. blue indicates masculinity, yellow stands for femininity and joy, and red suggests violence). That said, I do love colour and I don’t feel the need to stay faithful to my subject’s original palette. Why not have a green seagull for a change? Or if it suits the colour scheme of the room better, an orange/red impala with purple horns?
Author: kasainteriors
Birds Large and Small (2015)
I always consider myself extremely lucky when capturing a cool bird shot. While my family played soccer at picnic site in the Crater, I saw a pair of yellow-billed kites approaching and executing the most stunning flight manoeuvres right above my head. Never before I had seen them that close in flight. I grabbed the camera and started shooting.
While in Phinda, I tried to capture village weavers as they busily built their precariously fragile nests when seemingly out of nowhere the jewel of all birds – a malachite kingfisher – landed on a branch right in front of my camera.
On the opposite end of the bird kingdom’s beauty continuum, we find the marabous. But even these fairly unsightly birds make for fascinating shots when caught doing some interesting stuff. We watched them hunting for fish in an almost dried out waterhole which was close to our lodge in Phinda. Not surprisingly, within days – and ‘assisted’ by a group of equally eager saddle-billed storks – they managed to kill off almost every creature that was still alive in the super shallow waters. The stench was overwhelming since the birds were getting picky and did not eat all they killed. Thankfully, this is one feature that can’t (yet?) be captured ‘on film’. The white-faced whistling ducks were simply silent witnesses to the massacre.
The fish eagles made my day when we saw them at a different dam. And, of course, the flamingoes did the same when they came close to the shore so that I could take a few pictures that showed more than simply thousands of black dots moving about in the middle of the lake.
General game taking the limelight (2015)
Landscapes
Reflections and Light. Water and Trees. Great, but I am certainly not a landscape painter though once in a while it’s a nice challenge. Needless to say, STICKS was inspired by Ansel Adams’ work. I just had to have those oversized birch trees in my living room. BALINESE MIRROR WORLD turned into a pretty tedious challenge as I had to get all those ‘arbitrary’ water shades right if I didn’t want to risk ruining the overall effect. I painted HALF DOME and EL CAPITAN almost back to back. The latter was based on a stunning photograph by Stefan Heck, a great photographer, and friend and former colleague of my husband.
FLOWER POWER
I have always loved flowers for their beautiful colours, incredible variety and amazingly detailed shapes. How can something so tiny be so beautiful? Unfortunately, most of us won’t spend a lot of time looking at a particular flower. But, when you do, it seems as if an entirely new world opens up right in front of you. All that incredible detail that makes up those delicate shapes – the folds, the wrinkles, the translucency of the petals, the sometimes almost alien-like shapes of stigma, style and filament – isn’t that amazing?
Of course, I wasn’t the first one who painted flowers in a large scale to show off their hidden beauty. American artist Georgia O’Keeffe was decades ahead of me and justified her motivation to paint gigantic flowers as follows:
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
After seeing her inspiring work, I no longer could.
Portraits
When I had my “Asian Phase”, I did a few yoga inspired portraits of a yoga-friend instructor of mine. Subsequently, my three daughters requested their own portraits … which were much harder to do. After all, as a painting mom you do not only seek to capture the looks of your children, but also their personality. This took some practice, but was getting easier with each consecutive attempt. The backgrounds of “Lotus”, “Bella” and “Blue Eyes” are inspired by Gustav Klimt’s work.