Notes

Andrew Verster had three exhibitions of work in the early 1990s that showed heavily vegetated environments depicted in brilliant, vivid colour, shocking pinks, squashed berry purples, electric blues and burning hot oranges. They were Swamps, Hillsides and Islands (Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 1990), Fragile Paradise (NSA Gallery, Durban, 1990) and Hotlands (Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg 1993). ‘The words Fragile Paradise touched a raw nerve, they evoke so many things that I feel are happening now, the new energy in this part of the world – and elsewhere – so many possibilities in ourselves, yet always the potential for destruction, finding paradise or losing it … about remote Edens that had forever remained the same, but which today are threatened … My aim … was to find a metaphor in the marks of paint for my feelings, to create an energetic and beautiful world which would be like no other I’d seen.¹

1. Andrew Verster, Invitation Notes, 1990, quoted in Mapping Terra Incognita, exhibition catalogue, Durban: Durban Art Gallery, page 27.