KYARA VAN MEEL

The artist’s ability to intertwine contrasting elements – micro and macro, light and dark, form and ephemerality – bestows her work with an elusive and dreamlike quality. Inspired by romantic landscapes, botanical structures and childhood memories, her canvases evoke a sense of wonder. Her soft, rounded shapes are drawn from plants and fruits while also hinting at the curves of the human body, suggesting an intimate interconnectedness between different life forms. Diffuse layers of oil paint seem to unfurl slowly across time and space, building into textured worlds where light seeps through arch-like spaces, offering a glimpse into the beyond.

In her charcoal wall drawings, van Meel harnesses the symmetrical and synchronised movements of both arms in an embodied form of automatic drawing.

Standing in a single spot close to the wall, the artist is unable to form a judgement of the overall composition as it progresses. “During this process, my presence merges onto the wall as it shows my traces,” van Meel says. She aims to achieve a mental state of unboundedness or being at one with the world, while also extending her paintings into the spaces around them to create a sense of immersion. Echoing the way nature reclaims and transforms its surroundings, the spiralling charcoal lines suggest plants growing over man-made structures, roots breaching concrete, or vines weaving through wall cracks.

The artist finds inspiration in Romantic landscapes, which are reflected in the broad outlines of her underlying compositional structures.

She is particularly interested in the distribution of light and dark, high contrast and tight structures that give these landscape paintings such impact. Building up layer by layer, she superimposes this macro view with a close-up exploration of micro structures, such as those found in fruit or leaves. As a city-dweller, van Meel’s botanical knowledge is usually sourced from books, which have helped inform her practice.

She cites Jennifer Higgie’s book The Other Side as a touchstone for finding kinship within a lineage of women abstract artists who were interested in spiritualism and the interconnections between life forms. In particular, she relates to Hilma af Klint’s spiritual approach to biomorphic forms and Georgia O’Keeffe’s visual linkages between fruits or flowers and the female body.

Van Meel’s colour palette, characterised by sunlit yellow, forest greens and ocean blues, draws from her early education steeped in nature studies. Her colours evoke a sense of organic growth, where each hue responds to the others in visual harmony.

“My grandpa was an artist too and he taught me to find the lightest point in paintings, to see how it reflects on other aspects,” she explains. “Often I can find a rhythm in colour use. I have a preference for colour and light coming together, responding to each other throughout the whole painting to create an atmospheric image.” There’s a meditative streak to van Meel’s process, a trust in the unfolding of each piece without the weight of a predetermined outcome. The works, like the artist herself, seem to embrace the uncertainty of becoming. They invite us to linger, to enter a space where we might lose and rediscover ourselves in the layers of light and shadow.