Ndebele Inspired Birch Trees

Oil on Canvas
20*30"



This is a painting of Birch trees. What I really like about Birch Trees are the knobs, old branches and scars that turns black on the smooth whitish bark and the lines that develop around these "marks of age". As you can see I have moved away from my traditional style of almost realistic florals but is now moving more towards abstract and geometric forms inspired by the Ndebele paintings.
I have always found their paintings very appealing due to the bright colour use. If you have not noticed, I thrive on vibrant colour!

So why use Ndebele paintings as inspiration?
See every artist is influenced by everything they see, I wish to call this my visual vocabulary. The Ndebele tribe lives in the Pretoria region where I used to live and I use to see ladies wear blankets and beads with bright coloured geometric forms. Thus, it is part of my visual vocabulary.
Currently I am residing in Alberta where I see plenty of Birch and Aspen trees. Birch trees happens to be my favourite :). So now I have combined my visual vocabulary on one painting.
Birch trees through African eyes.

If you are intersted in Ndebele Paintings aswell here is a very informative link.

http://academic.evergreen.edu/projects/wallpainting/ndebele.htm

Here is a picture of a birch tree forest. It is not the picture  I used as reference in the painting, but here you can see the light color bark and the black spots and lines. You can also see that they grow in "waves" sometimes.