SASHA HARTSLIEF | The Quiet Hour

My paintings always begin with light — how it enters a room and captures a moment. I paint ordinary scenes caught in the act of being ordinary: people in rooms, unaware, doing nothing remarkable. Each window holds its own enclosed world. I am drawn to that separation and to the moments in between the important events of our lives- when we are waiting and nothing is happening, and the room carries on telling its own story.  The subject matter is less important to me than what the light conveys — the mood a particular colour creates, whether it is a brilliant warm afternoon yellow, a calm subdued grey, or the patterns created by sunlight through window blinds. I always feel a tension between the interior world and the one looking in; the scattering of objects, pictures on the wall, suggest a life lived beyond the captured moment, familiar and startlingly intimate, a sense perhaps of looking at your own life from the outside. I try to use colour and light to convey that mood,  to set the temperature and sometimes even evoke a memory. They are visitors moving across the room on an ordinary afternoon, ever-present and indifferent to the presence or absence of people, and yet quietly creating the mystery of the moment.

For any further enquiries please contact gallery@everard.co.za