Candace Charlton South African, b. 1968

Candace Charlton (1968, Durban) was born in the large, multicultural South African port city of Durban in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. After completing her studies in Fine Arts and Art History at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, she soon began exhibiting her work. Love brought her to the Netherlands in 2000, where she has lived and worked ever since. For several years now, she has been alternating life in the Netherlands with her Italian studio in Volterra. 

Art had been her passion since her early childhood: “At primary school, I was in love with art; every week, I looked forward to Friday, to an hour and a half of art lessons”. Her mother was a professional pianist, and the music in her parents' home certainly struck a chord with her artistic sensibilities. The university she chose was located in the Eastern Cape. The work there was mainly classical and students drew from real models, in contrast to other universities where abstraction prevailed at the time.

Candace Charlton's canvases are often large and impressive, immersing the viewer in a kaleidoscope of warm colours and intense light. A range of golden yellow, earth brown and terracotta red tones surround her female figures and transport us to another, magical world. The human form, in particular the portrait, has long been the main focus in Charlton’s work. She strives to discover and reveal the mystery and depth of the human psyche in her intensively studied portraits and figurative compositions. In recent years the landscape has also begun to appear in her paintings. Her love of rendering a mood and atmosphere finds a new expression using nature as her subject matter. ‘I strive to capture the essence of being human and represent the mystery of humanity. In my figurative compositions, and in recent years increasingly in the nature that surrounds them, I seek to connect the two. This theme plays an essential role in my paintings,’ says Charlton.