About me

Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1979, Santjie is an emerging painter whose work is a
deeply felt investigation of light — its character, its purity, and its profound capacity
to reveal the world anew. At the heart of her practice is a fascination with the way light
moves through and around us, generating subtle chromatic vibrations and textural
shifts that we sense more often than we consciously see. For Santjie, painting is an act
of making visible what is ordinarily overlooked: the living, breathing quality of
illumination that underpins all of existence.
Her work is also about holism — about our intimately interconnected nature with this
universe that envelops and enfolds us every day, and about our ongoing dialogue with
everything that exists inside and around us in every moment. Light, for Santjie, is the
most eloquent expression of that interconnectedness: the medium through which the
world touches us, and through which we come to know it.
Santjie’s fascination with art began as a small child. As a little girl, before even knowing
the term complementary colours, she would sit in the rocking boat and pair up reds
with greens in long-winded fairy tales of green knights saving red maidens. Nature has
always played a great role in her life. Growing up in very close proximity to the ocean,

her parents instilled in her a deep reverence for the beauty and majesty of the natural
world — its textures, its moods, and above all, the extraordinary quality of its light. She
attended the Jack Meyer School of Art in Paarl in Grade 11 and 12.
After completing a degree in photography and working across numerous fields, Santjie
realised that her heart was yearning to pick up a brush and dip it in paint once again.
It was photography, perhaps, that first sharpened her eye to the transformative power
of light — the way a single shift in illumination can change the entire emotional register
of a scene. In 2022 she took the plunge and resumed the magical journey she had left
more than twenty years ago in an art school in Paarl. Since then, her painting has
become an ever-deepening exploration of light’s capacity for nuance.
Her work can be found in numerous private collections worldwide and has been shown
in group exhibitions including Shadow and Light by Motif and Muse at the Erinvale
Golf Club; Walk of Art in Constantia Village; and Tales from the Shore at Stillbaai
Gallery. She was awarded an Honourable Mention for her photographic series
“Temporality” in The International Photography AwardsTM, a sister initiative of the
Lucie Foundation.
Currently, Santjie can be found in Paarl, preparing a body of work for future
exhibitions — paintings that continue her pursuit of light in all its character, its
goodness, and its quietly extraordinary truth.