Cornelie Wolff

The contemporary South African artist, Cornelie Wolff, has been working as a full-time artist for eight years.  In that time, Ms. Wolff has demonstrated her ability to create work of high interest and quality.

As an impressionist, her style is influenced by low light photography, painting only what is essential. Leaving the rest for the viewer’s eye to complete – compelling the viewer to add emotion to her work.

Cornelie works mostly with oils on canvas.  Her second love is charcoal. When working in oil, the artist aims to leave texture and visible brush strokes on the surface.  Her love of colour is what makes her works stand out.  Unlike other contemporaries, the use of muted tones with splashes of crimson, bright blues or pinks give Ms. Wolff’s work a sense of calm.

Most of her subjects are people captured in natural poses doing everyday things.  With a background in art therapy, her studies of people – especially children at play – appeal to the casual viewer.  Certain portrait studies of adults convey the subject’s thoughts and emotions in powerful understatement.  Viewers are forced to wonder what are the stores behind the pigment and the canvas.

This artist’s work is influenced by great names such as Rika de Klerk, Willie Jacobs, Koos Bronkhorst, Niel Moss, Rentia Coetzee, Ruth Walters, Elize Bezuidenhout, Charla Maarschalk and Jennifer McChristian

When asked about what inspires Ms. Wolff to create her work, she said: “People mostly. I can be anywhere and a moment or interaction or the colours will just transform into a painting in my head. Sometimes I would have read something or had an inspirational conversation with someone and then see a flower or birds or a person in a certain circumstance and that will symbolize for me my own experience in that situation, again becoming a painting in my head”.

In the last 24 months, Ms. Wolff has sold more than 300 works, and her popularity as an artist is on a steady rise.