San-Marí van Wyk's fine art blog: Remember when art was fun?: "Skoon"

This is the second piece in my white painting series, except it has no paint, only different types of paper. I used tracing paper, crepe paper, newsprint and cellophane that I covered in cold glue and stuck to the canvas. When using tracing paper in the first layer of my previous painting "Glacier", I fell in love with the way it dries after it has been covered in cold glue and I actually felt a little sad that I had to paint over it. The pearly effect it gave made me really want to do an artwork consisting mostly if not completely out of tracing paper stuck on canvas - and that is how this artwork came to be. I added the other white or see-through materials so I could juxtapose different shades of white to give the painting more depth.

"Skoon" means "clean" in Afrikaans, but in terms of the word "skoonheid" it mean "beauty". It got its pearly effect from the tracing paper that it is mostly made up of and this pearly effect made me think of a fresh, clean and pure beauty. My mom keeps on saying it reminds her of a wedding dress, which I can't argue with, haha. So that's how I came up with the name, it's in Afrikaans because I just couldn't find a fitting word in English that gave me the same feeling as "skoon" did.