Mainspring IV Painting

Tam Chianta grew up in South Africa and Mauritius. Her imagination was nurtured from a young age by the many artists in her family and she would often help her mother paint ostrich eggs for her stall in the Cape Town Waterfront. She emigrated to the United Kingdom as a teenager and went on to obtain a BA degree in Fine Art and Art History from Goldsmiths. Tam lives and works in London and her art has appeared in galleries across the capital. "With large flowing brushstrokes, I blend primary colours to create vibrant intertwining shapes with unpredictable colour combinations. Sometimes I will enhance these shapes with a bold block colour background. Other times I create an atmospheric backdrop full of flowing contours that play with light and shadows, inspired by shifting cloud formations and their reflections in water. It is the transience of nature that intrigues me, the way it is constantly changing and evolving. I find such incredible beauty in images of space, in particular the birth of stars – as intricate networks of dust and gas come together and collapse on themselves to form the first lights in the darkness. I feel a real sense of awe being confronted by something so immense and I am humbled by my role within something so much greater than myself. I strive to capture a sense of the sublime in my abstract paintings and in particular the feelings of wellbeing that it can induce."