KARLALISE HORSTMANS

This work is a celebration of the joyful tradition we have developed in our sleepy town of helping the local kids celebrate Easter by staging an Easter Egg Hunt at the local primary school forest. Children wandered up to school on Sunday morning with all manner of bright clothes and baskets / bags, ready to feast on their haul.
In this work, I wanted to capture some of their individual characters in their hands and feet, and their baskets, while also recognizing their uniform objective in the moment. They were gathered together for one purpose only that day!
The school buildings behind them I depicted in slightly abstract forms, as though organized education is the hard structure against which children are cast when beginning their learning journey. The system is one size fits all, and yet they show up so adorably different, all wanting the same thing.
I continued my habit of painting slowly in layers. This work was made more challenging by its scale, a very small work by my ordinary standards. It called for careful execution to capture the details, without losing myself into a spiral of perfectionism. I like to keep the brush work loose enough that there is still room for happy accidents, and impulsive decisions about color, texture, light / shadow and forms.