Description
BIOGRAPHY OF GABRIELLE RAAFF
Gabrielle Raaff (b.1970) is a painter who lives and works in Cape Town. Raaff’s works begin with a photographic image. And while this image only serves as a starting point, it seems that we are repeatedly brought back to the photographic process. It’s as if the medium of photography and its ability to fix an image is what piques her interest. The artist works with ethereality. She uses the media of ink, watercolour and water-based oil as a vehicle for alluding to the form, the function and the emotion of her subject. Landscape and its reference both to actual place and places of the subconscious are what can be found lurking in her paintings. Raaff’s most notable earlier works in watercolour and ink capturing beach and city figures and aerial Google satellite images of distinctly different South African neighborhoods, rely on a cool relationship between herself and the subject and revel in the abstract qualities of the view. Recent works have seen a return to a more visceral use of water-based oil to help play out a more intimate painterly relationship with the subject.
In 1994 Raaf completed two short courses in Art Therapy and Colour at Central Saint Martins University in London. In 1992 she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Stellenbosch University, and a Higher Diploma in Education at the same university.
