Exploring fleeting moments with paints, being mesmerised by watercolour’s spontaneous organic shapes, reflecting nature’s rhythms.
Hi and welcome; my name is Anita.
Thanks so much for your interest in my artwork,
I am an artist who enjoys painting mostly in watercolours but also love the richness of oils.
Our world has become so busy that we often battle to just stop, reflect, and recharge. I want to create a space where you, the viewer, can stop and reconnect with creation. I am mesmerised by the way watercolours move. Their momentum reflects nature’s unpredictability – always fleeting and never still. Watercolours have a life of their own, opening up new possibilities for creating spontaneous organic shapes that are fluid, free, and unique in their patterns.
Come and join me in reflecting and reconnecting with nature’s beauty and the memories of fleeting moments. May you find much joy and peace.
READ MORE ABOUT ANITA’S ART STORY BELOW
Johannesburg artist Anita Atkinson (nee Ferrandi) explores fleeting moments with both oil and watercolour paints; being mesmerised by how watercolour’s spontaneous organic shapes reflect and connect to the ever-changing rhythms of nature.
Anita has had a passion to create from a very young age. Her mother speaks of having to plaster reams of newsprint around their house as she would continually draw on walls and even on the sidewalk outside their home.
Anita pursued this childhood passion and studied BA with Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. Here she was privileged to have the prolific Judith Mason as one of her painting instructors and later studied watercolour painting with Michael Du Toit. She has mastered a variety of media and has previously been commissioned to do a set of pencil drawings and watercolour paintings. In the late ‘80s, she held a solo exhibition, selling most of this art. She held children’s art classes for a couple of years and participated in the Mall of Africa art exhibition in 2019. Having done much ballet in her youth, dancers have been the subject of some of her paintings where she captures the fleeting moments between their gestures, rhythms, and movements.
After many years of raising a family, Anita has spent the past 10 years focussing more on further developing herself as an artist. In 2014 she joined The Fine Art Studio on an art tour to Florence, Italy. This transitioned her into a deeper level of her art practice.
During Lockdown, Anita sketched and painted many flowers and birds in their garden. She also had the opportunity to donate a piece of artwork to a Nature Reserve in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa which desperately needed to raise funds. Her artwork “African Painted Wolf” is now printed on T-shirts in support of this cause.
Anita regularly attends life drawing classes where she fine-tunes her skills in drawing the human figure’s anatomy, gestures and fleeting moments as the live model moves through poses. This knowledge translates into her dancer sketches and paintings.
She currently works and creates from her studio in Bryanston, Johannesburg.
“To be an artist is to believe in life.”
- HENRY MOORE -
I find so much inspiration watching birds. They have fascinating little personalities, gestures, and sweet connection moments where they truly seem to be having a good chat! I spotted these two - one listening attentively whilst the other was chatting away. We can learn so much from them in our own lives - learn to listen well. Being quick to hear and slow to speak is so important in making good connections.
“Connection”
“So art is saying stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.”