Cobus Erasmus; born in 1994. South African artist (based in Pretoria) who studied fine art at the Florence Classical Art Academy for a year. However, before heading off to Italy, he studied Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria and received the degree in 2018. Since 2019, art has been a full-time pursuit.
I try to create pictures that move me and attempt to capture something beautiful and ungraspable with each painting.
The medium by which I pursue this goal is predominantly through realistic oil paintings. However, as with all artists, I constantly get tempted to explore new avenues and tools to express my art. As one can see from the variety of styles and subjects shown on this page.
Roughly speaking, the philosophy of my painting style is to find a harmony between chaos and order. To balance free brush strokes with precise, calculated marks determined down to the millimetre (I literally have my face 10cm away from the canvas when I’m painting those parts). I owe the origin of realism in my work to the Classical Art school in Italy, where we would academically study and draw live models with their anatomy in mind.
I received a lot of inspiration predominantly from the 19th-century impressionist painters, as seen in my oil on canvas artworks. The impressionistic influence is primarily due to my studies in Florence, where especially the Russian artists, such as Ilya Repin, Valenti Serov and Nicolai Fechin were explored.
