About Salomi

 
Salomi Prinsloo is an artist working and living in Pretoria, South Africa, who regards art as an outcome of life and living according to her, necessitates and awakens art making.
It is her firm belief that art heals or has the potential to bring about various form of healing. The creative process excites even thrills  Salomi and brings to life the core of her existence. This concept that art heals, beautifies and enriches lives has kept her productive for more than 35 years.
 
She regularly explores this wonder world in her painting process which she calls her secret garden, a place of spirituality and retreat.  The creative process is her way of celebrating the beauty of being alive and it allows her an opportunity to be energized by natural and artistic beauty. For her, the act of painting is a form of artistic breathing, because she takes and she gives. During the painting process she takes from the magical moments of artistic expression and spontaneity to feed her soul, and then she gives the outcome of the process and shares artistic beauty, as a catalyst for change, healing, growth and joy.

                                                    

 ”Breath of life” Acrylic on canvas, 2011  Acrylic  canvas. 500 x 600 mm

Everyday scenes and objects are changed into something the viewer has never experienced before: a world of wonder and awe. Salomi’s work captures transformed reflections of her surroundings, the world she lives in, founded in internal and external awareness. Her work becomes a visual voice luring the viewer into a magical world of color, shape, texture and design.

 

Dreamscape - Tranquil thoughts, 2015. Acrylic on canvas.  600 x 800 mm
She brings emotions and thoughts into the visible world on the picture plane where they become a display for interactions.  Her work refers to things that already exist but she seeks to portray it in a beautified and transformed manner, to allow the viewer to see the ordinary in a brand new light. Her purpose is to create art which can communicate both powerfully emotionally and intellectually. She aims to trigger an array of feelings by employing formal technical qualities and combining them skilfully with the complexities of her chosen themes, thus allowing perceived artistic beauty to exist as a form of knowledge and restoration.
Being raised on a farm had a profound influence on her connection and respect for nature as it shaped her value system to a great extent and it still echoes in her art making currently. Salomi was born in Standerton and raised on a farm in the Orange Free State called Daeraad, and  obtained the BA (Fine Arts) degree at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria. She established the Salomi Prinsloo Visual Art Centre in Pretoria, where she presents art courses to adults. She exhibits regularly nationally and abroad.  Her painting “Butchered Rainbow” was exhibited in the Florence Biennale in 2009.  
She believes this pastoral connection is pulsating passionately through her works and should not be seen as a static reality. Her work is not so much concerned with the external features but is rather infused with hidden meanings and impulses of her pastoral connection and value system.

Butchered Rainbow, 2008. Acrylic on board. 1220 x 2440 mm

Dr Pieter Pienaar describes Salomi’s artistic development over the last decade as follows:
“From the heat of the blazing sun into the whispers of the cool morning light” is how I would summarize the change I can detect in Salomi’s work over the course of a decade.
The bright ochre-oranges and strong purples, applied with forceful large brushstrokes, defining dominant large masculine “earthbound shapes”, were gradually replaced by a rainbow of colors applied with lighter and smaller featherly strokes, mystically “caressing” the more floral and feminine shapes on the canvas. The latter works in her repertoire reveal a splendid range of subtleties with regards to texture and shade. Nuances of an ethereal nature became more prominent as the new body of work gained thematic strength. The issues she addresses point to the realm of human responsibility and she awakens a social consciousness beautifully with her mature skill.”

"Rejoice, 2016.  Acrylic on canvas,  300 x 300 mm

Salomi’ mission as an artist is to evoke awe, associated with curiosity and a desire to explore the picture plane through extreme skillful use of her media, embedded in complexities pertaining to her art process and themes.  Her purpose is to unashamedly beautify, enrich and color her viewer’s perception with joy and a sense of rich experience. Her chosen focus for her future works is to “rainbow” the colors of her works even more, deliberately endeavoring to transform her viewers’ perceptions even more in an amicable way, in order to facilitate greater change.  She will continue to create and to enrich the lives of others through her painting, teaching and workshops. She plans to launch a distance learning drawing course soon, which will enable anyone desiring to master the skill of drawing, to do so conveniently at home.