STOP AND SMELL THE FLOWERS : Cathy Layzell; Julie Tugwell; Uwe Phaff; Catherine Holthauzen

The exhibition intent is to remind us all to stay in the moment and take time to contemplate and be intentional about our environment and how we choose to occupy our time. Many people had the opportunity and time to reflect and contemplate during the lockdown and possibly the realization how good down time and slowing the phase is for us. Stop and smell the flowers serve to remind us all to not just return to the chase and to appreciate and indulge in sensory activities.

We urge everyone to make a conscious earth pledge by being more mindful of the potentially destructive nature of our consumer choices and how they impact upon the environment lets embody the spirit of intentional choices.

This exhibition will be running until mid November and we hope that you can take time out to come stop and smell the flowers.

Cathy Layzell

Detail of: **Cecilia Forest 1** R 25 000.00 Media: Oil on cavas Cathy Layzell’s intensely colored, gestural oil paintings use a number of recurring motifs, taken from Nature. They contain a remarkable color sense, where large shaggy swathes of pigment-loaded brushstrokes are scrubbed over thinner washes of layered color creating an illusion of depth and light. Ambiguous forms that might suggest rocks, foliage, petals, coral or fish float in and are reflected in watery surfaces.

Julie Tugwell

Details of: **Natures pace** R12 000.00 153 mm x 110 mm Media: Oil on canvas (Canvas Un-stretched)
Currently in my studio there is a visual language of colour and gestural marks – lively and expansive carrying a virtue of emotion. These paintings are influenced directly from ardour, expressed through intense colour and bold brushstrokes. These instinctual colour fields do not always depict or produce a focal point of attention but instead draw the viewer into seasons of sentiment, creating a response to the overall painting. Hence my art is a task of abstracting of emotion called emotionism, painting from an inner emotion to the point of freedom.

Catherine Holtzhausen

Details of: **Recover** R7800.00 970mm x 760 mm Media Handcut fused refuse bags framed in Kiaat
Catherine Holtzhausen is a collage artist and illustrator. Her lively figures celebrate a bountiful existence crafted from paper textures achieved by watercolour painting, oil-based monotype and collagraph printing methods. Holtzhausen’s works stand as a confident challenge to social constructs, particularly the media-molded inner voice of women telling themselves that they are less.

Uwe Phaff

**Fish Walker :** Copper plated Steel R5400 The core theme of my latest body of work is the issue of presence and absence: being somewhere and then not, moving from one state to another. It would be easy to see this as a question of ‘life and death’, but while such thoughts naturally are at the back of everyone’s mind at some point, I am more directly talking about a more positive possibility, namely that shifting states and opposites somehow have the shade of the other embedded in them. In absence there is the potential for presence. In wakefulness the promise of sleep and from death new life emerges.