James De Villiers
James de Villiers, based in Johannesburg, is a mainly self-taught artist having undergone periods of art studies at Unisa and the Free State Technicon in the 1970s. He has a background as a retail display artist, advertising, magazine, book and graphic designer, illustrator, theatrical props maker, DJ, electronic music experimentalist and newspaper infographic artist.
During this time, he was also an active fine artist and ran several of his own experimental galleries. In 2014 de Villiers started doing his own art on a full-time basis. He works with realism and abstraction creating mixed media drawings, oil and acrylic paintings and silkscreened artworks. His works are in many collections in South Africa and abroad.
De Villier's work is a meditation on the state of nature, its decay and regeneration, ecology and "making the invisible forces of nature visible". He is equally inspired by the growth and decay of plants in a garden and the discoveries of the James Webb Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider. His art is greatly inspired by William Blake:
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
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