the art of surprise

THERE’S ALWAYS A MOMENT of surprise in Robert Malherbe’s day, just waiting for the artist to discover it. It could be the very specific way the light is falling on his wife’s neck, or a landscape that he’s painted dozens of times before, rendered new by a change in weather, time or perspective. “I could paint the same view, day after day after day, and it’ll be different every day,” he explains. “For me, the excitement is seeing something – you get that rush from the visual data of what you’re looking at.”

When that inspiration(meaning ‘at first attempt’) to capture the experience in one take. “I think the faster you work, the greater the element of surprise, because your hand does things and your brain does things and you might see a patch of yellow, but you push it, and then the whole picture becomes more about the yellow than anything else,” he says. “It’s a very exciting thing, painting.”