Raewyn Sceats
ABOUT RAEWYN SCEATS
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Raewyn is a self-taught visual artist in Napier, with a love of experimenting with the human form – fascinated with shape and colour, but is not into adding faces to her works as she believes this would ‘take away from the edginess of the painting’. Raewyn uses texture in place of features which gives her paintings an incredible depth and a three dimensional effect whilst remaining clean in their featureless simplicity.
“Focused on dreamlike feeling - shapes not defined, figures stand on their own as we come back to a pure human form without complexity or ‘noise’”. Raewyn’s figures float on the canvas, forms blending together without too much definition. She adopted and embraced her textured style by ‘happy accident’ – one day painting over an old painting using a pallet knife with a combination of gesso, model compound and sawdust – Raewyn discovered how wonderfully this combination could be manipulated (with fingers or knife) to build texture, a very tactile approach to the works. She could then paint on top of this – layer by layer in order to achieve the desired result. “I could feel the paint better than when using a brush. I use rags a lot, a technique I call ‘scrumbling’”. The result is simply beautiful, and indeed – dreamlike. |
Raewyn’s use of color is indicative of an artist that is largely self-taught with no boundaries or restraint on how colors ‘should’ be put together - she allows herself to experiment outside of the usual pallet and blend combinations that are unusual and strangely beautiful. But it did take some time for Raewyn to believe in her own art. “Something in me wanted to paint, to be recognized as a painter – to believe people would want my work.” Raewyn does not like ‘ordinary’ or normal and her work is reflective of that attitude.
Her husband Roger believed in her and encouraged her to become a professional artist. It took one year for her first painting to sell and she then went on to have a successful joint exhibition with another artist. Her work took off and she has moved positively forward, constantly developing her style and her following.
Raewyn has been a professional artist now for many years, with a number of successful exhibitions to her credit. She has been selected for the Norsewear Art Awards twice, including a second placing. Telecom Art Awards has been another achievement. Raewyn has sold paintings throughout New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia.
Raewyn’s is wonderfully talented and as such, wildly popular and we are so very pleased to represent her.
