About Studio Selah
Dearest Reader,
Bringing my art online, into the open for all to see, brings with it a satisfying joy, but also an awareness of vulnerability. Each artwork I create lays bare parts of my inner being, my hardships and joys, my yearnings, faith inspired declarations and revelations. To me, this is so much more than a business. It is a visual and personal proclamation of who I am by His grace and what I believe this world could be. It is my life-song and I invite you to sing along.
The love for creative expression is written into the stanzas of my family line and sung over my life since I can remember. By observing my grandmother (whom I was named after) meticulously working square for square on her landscape oil paintings, watching my father adding fine touches to the woodwork and buildings he crafted on our family farm. Perceiving my mother rendering the dinner table into an artistic culinary display of love… All these acts of creation became an inspirational activator for generations to come.
At 12 years old, I sold my first painting of two red parrots in a giftshop across the SPAR convenience store in Standerton in an effort to save money for a silver flute. This painting and this silver flute became the fundamental intro to my life-song. Painting and music - my two fishes and five loaves of bread offered to the sustenance of an empty-bellied crowd (see Process & Pondering – Cast of Excellence). Whereas music is an outlet and my love-gift to others, art is the realm where I have spent years in formal study, teaching and exploring new techniques.
In my art career, I have encountered intimidating giants of criticism, and self-induced expectations of perfection, until I finally came to the Living stream of grace where my true reflection rippled through God's perspective untilI I could see who I truly am – deeply rooted in Love, accepted and unashamed. This has become my safe place, the place from where I could emerge from my cocoon to create with boldness and freedom.
So this is my story, this is my song.
I have come from the normality of client-pleasing self-expression and metamorphosed into a realm where the intentional focus is not on my work, but rather on the greatest Artist of all. My aim is to capture in colour and truth, the "whispering mysteries" of God's heart, with the intention to lead you, dearest viewer, far beyond my artwork.
“Art, if it can be ascribed value, is most valuable when its beauty (and the beauty of the truth it tells) bewilders, confounds, defies evil itself; it does so by making what has been unmade; it subverts the spirit of the age; it mends the heart by whispering mysteries the mind alone can’t fathom. None of these songs and stories matter if the beauty they’re adding to isn’t the kind of beauty that redeems and reclaims.” (Andrew Peterson)
As you observe and absorb the message that emits from my art to your heart, may you clearly hear the unique melody that God sings over your life.
Much love,
Elize Roelofse
