Marittie de Villiers
(1966 – )
Marittie de Villiers was born in 1966. She attended the High School Gimnasium in Potchefstroom, where she matriculated with extinctions in both Afrikaans and Art in 1983.
She then went on to study and completed her degree in B.A. Communications at Potchefstroom University. Yet she didn’t intend on climbing the corporate career. She decided to work at the Herald Newspaper in Potchefstroom for one year. By the age of 25 years de Villiers felt that she wanted to move to Cape Town.
Within the next eight years de Villiers also travelled to Cairo, Egypt, and 18 states of America, where she worked in the corporate world as a Public Relations officer and Personal Assistant. In 1997 she started doing woodwork; making mirror frames, and small sculptures, and even sold them at the Waterfront and art shows in and around Cape Town.
de Villiers, some years later, started painting professionally, and had her first exhibition in 2005.
de Villiers considers the actual paint together with the act of painting as that which constitutes her art to the fullest degree. Portraiture is her preferred mode and her models are everyday people that cross her path. de Villiers selects people that have a very specific soulfulness which connects to her visual sensitivity. She aims at creating an expressionistic vision formed by bands of colour and very gestural swathes of paint. For de Villiers the painted surface becomes more significant than the form she has chosen to represent. She also views the painting as secondary to the act of painting itself.