Notes

Artist's Bio

After acquiring a distinction in art in matric, Anna qualified as an interior designer at CTUT, working in retail and hospitality design before marriage, motherhood, and family business. Since 2012 Anna has been proving her value as an artist, mainly working in water media and drawing, and she has been acknowledged amongst the top contenders on platforms like SA Taxi Foundation Fine Art Awards 2015, Art Lovers 1932 Competitions of 2015 and 2016, and she won the Thami Mnyeli Art on Paper Merit Award 2016. She also achieved third place in IWSSA International Competition 2019. Liebenberg has participated in group exhibitions from Pretoria to Kalkbay and her work has been sold to private collectors in SA, Mauritius, the USA and Ireland. Anna illustrated The Way of the World Works – published in March 2021 on Kindle, by revered South African author Peter Wilhelm. She occasionally assists galleries in curating exhibitions with and for fellow artists. Liebenberg expresses her love for nature, translated into her view of the world, in her layered work.

Artist's Statement

Float

How does your heart get to feather weight
by the time that it gets weighed?
How do you navigate?
when you’re in this world, but not from this world?
How does your life translate
that which is innate?

I express my love for nature through the translucent medium of watercolours. This medium allows me to relay the full nuance of the spectrum of light. The tenderness and fragility of creation is well represented within this medium. It is my view that being human is an integral part of the whole of creation and in no way separate or superior to the intelligence and life forms which sustains the human existence. The awakening humanity is currently experiencing, is renewing our contract with mother earth, where the misplaced arrogance and negligent behaviour of humans incessantly polluting and consuming the riches of our planet, is being replaced with greater awareness. Throughout history, humans suffered trials and tribulations in the revolving politics, war, famine, and strife of the day, on a continuous path of evolvement towards enlightenment. Time and time again nature pressed the reset button through pandemics and natural disasters to get the wake-up call registered in human DNA.

It is my view that ancient ruins, folklore, and mythology bears testimony to lost civilisations that succumbed to such events. If first you don’t succeed, try, try again; to lose the devil in the detail and woo the whole.

I constantly see the one thing represented in the other, the intrinsic patterns of nature reflected in macro and micro scale, pollen and viruses looking similar – the one seeding, the other killing – with death feeding life through the ever-evolving cycle of a dust-to-dust food chain . . . and the soul lives on.

Explore the self – for in the self lies it all.