AGAC 2024 Top 25 Finalist - Inge Marie Jensen - The Tavern Card Players

Inge-Marie was born into a creative family of 5 girls who are all artists, so art has always been constant - and an instinct - from an early age. Raised on a small holding in the picturesque and rural Eastern Cape in South Africa, her upbringing was enriched by an English school teacher mum and the practical ingenuity of her Danish father, whose innovative approaches to farm life and engineering, provided an ever-present backdrop of creativity and resourcefulness. This unique environment, characterised by open spaces and the raw beauty of the Eastern Cape, became a source of inspiration for Inge-Marie, shaping her distinctive bold artistic style. 

Inge-Marie was recently awarded a Top 25 Finalist in the ARTi Gallery Art Competition 2023, for which the subject was to "Africanise an old master." This achievement has reignited her passion for exploring boundaries between abstract and traditional forms and where there is now a profound focus on learning the techniques of sensual oil paint of an artistic vision. The studio is now buzzing with creativity, with new pieces constantly in development and then being added onto a newly designed website.

“This is my spin on Cézanne’s painting. Instead of the cold, dark and gloomy nights of the European tavern with dark colours - here, with my painting in the southern hemisphere, it is very much the opposite in almost every way.”

My journey as an artist towards making art like Cézanne, is interpreting his style and his continued choice of downplaying colour with 'staged' scenes of everyday life. My painting of two men playing cards is from a series of photographs that I took in a Hout Bay shabeen near Cape Town. This scene highlights the juxtaposing of various qualities from a Cézanne painting, in practically everything you see here. My tavern represents a vibrant scene in South Africa whereas the Cézanne's tavern is dark and gloomy. My oil colours used are slightly more vibrant here but do not necessarily veer away from the basic primal colours that was so evident in Cézanne's paintings. Vibrant colours used here have most likely been influenced by living in South Africa and cannot easily be contained!