Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne works predominantly in oil painting using a pastel palette in order to portray the world around her. Her subject matter is often the quotidian and banal, manifesting in bright and vivid gestural brushstrokes, and creating something of the surreal and magical on canvas. The balance between the magical and the banal in Emily’s work is what makes it so engaging and alluring. Her keen technical painting skills coupled with a playful brush is evocative of hot summers and a sense of ennuie that accompanies too much playtime. The absence of humans in her work is a subconsious choice, but there is personification within her titles, often dark and humorous, in stark contrast with her colourful subject matter. Labuschagne has been exhibited at the DAOR Contemporary Art Gallery on the Winter 2021 Group Exhibition and held a solo exhibition at the gallery in 2022 titled Things Evaporate but Never Disappear.
Flower Sponges, Oil on canvas, 2021, 180 x 180 cm
The Glass Fountain, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 180 x 180 cm
In the Sandpit We Lost Many Things, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 180 x 240 cm
A Table with Flowers and Co, Acrylic on Panel, 2021, 10 x 15 cm
Fruit and a Vase, Oil on Panel, 2022, 34 x 30 cm
Decapitation in the Doctor’s Waiting Room, Oil on Panel, 2022, 58 x 35 cm
Dog Park, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 70 x 90 cm
Shorelines, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 85 x 60 cm
On The Merry Go Round, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 85 x 60 cm
The Picnic Blanket, Ceramic, 2022, 20 x 19 x 19 cm
Blood Orange, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 85 x 60 cm
The Closeness Between Fruit and Their Pips, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 85 x 60 cm
Another vase and flowers, Four Layer Monoprint on Fabriano Rosapina, 2022, 50 x 34 cm
A vase and flowers I, Four layer Monoprint on Fabriano Rosapina, 2022, 50 x 34 cm
The Lawn Mower and Her Lawnmower, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 29.5 x 32.5
Vases and Their Shadows III, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 20 x 15 cm
Vases and Their Shadows II, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 20 x 15 cm
Vases and Their Shadows I, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 20 x 15 cm
Dolores, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 43 x 59 cm
Clivia Farm, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 31 x 24 cm
Pool Party, Oil on Board, 2021, 40 x 40 cm
On The Trampoline, Ceramic, 2022, 18.5 x 21 (diam) cm
Pregnant Watchdog, Oil on Board, 2021, 25 x 25 cm
Suffocation on Ward 6, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 41 x 41 cm
Murder of the Housewife (Living Room with a set table, fresh flowers, and a rug under a couch), Oil on Board, 2021, 38 x 50 cm
Practicing Serves on a Sunday Afternoon, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 30 x 42 cm
Naughtus the Naughty Dog, Oil on Board, 2021, 20 x 20 cm
The Light Weightlifter, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 59 x 42 cm
When the wind takes us both (and other things), Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 30 x 40 cm
In The Park, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 26 x 30 cm
Three dogs and a duck in a lake, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 63 x 80 cm
The Messy Hostess, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 58 x 40 cm
Double Fault, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 40 x 30 cm
Dog Race, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 45 x 125 cm
Playing in the tears of sprinklers, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 90 x 75 cm
When dogs bark loudly other dogs listen, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 15 x 20 cm
Things Evaporate but Never Disappear, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 100 x 75 cm
A Pink Tiled Bathroom, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 70 x 90 cm
Backstroke – 200 Laps, Ceramic, 2022, 16.5 x 10 x 20 cm
On the lawn, Oil on Board, 2022, 40 x 38 cm
One day, if I have a daughter, I will let her swing as high as she would like to (as my mother let me), Oil on Canvas, 2022, 50 x 40 cm
28 Show Guppies, Oil on Canvas, 2022, 15 x 30 cm
Water Balloon and a Floating Flamingo, Oil on Canvas Panel, 30 x 42 cm
When things fall they scatter, when they scatter they fly., Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 15 x 20 cm
Room II, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 24 x 36 cm
Room I, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 24 x 36 cm
Various fruits and a blue bowl on a pink table surface, Oil on Canvas, 2021, 70 x 90 cm
Unfortunate Events Series – Slipped off the cliff, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 35 x 25 cm
Unfortunate Events Series – Murder in the poppy field, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 35 x 25 cm
The Peach Orchid, Ceramic, 2022, 25 x 16.5 x 14 cm
Endless words but nothing to say, Oil on canvas panel, 2021, 40 x 50 cm
Not Pollination Series I, Oil on Board, 2021, 25 x 25 cm
Not Pollination Series II, Oil on Board, 2021, 25 x 25 cm
Dishes next to the sink, Oil on Board, 2021, 36 x 50 cm
A study of Pink Ladies, Golden Deliciousness, and Granny Smiths with wilting flowers, Oil on Board, 2021, 36 x 50 cm
One dead fish in two ponds I, Oil on Board, 2021, 36 x 50 cm
Two well-trained dogs waiting for their food (The unspoken complexities of training and the importance thereof), Oil on Canvas, 2022, 50 x 40 cm
Til Death Do Us Part, Oil on canvas panel, 2022, 30 x 40 cm
Green Fingers, Ceramic, 2022, 19.5 x 12 cm
Lousy Dogs III, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 20 x 14
Lousy Dogs II, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2021, 20 x 14 cm
Musical chairs in the church hall, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 30 x 42.5 cm
Single Flight, Oil on Board, 2022, 25 x 25 cm
Judas, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 62 x 40 cm
Watering the garden by myself, Oil on canvas, 2021, 36 x 81 cm
Inquisitive Insects, Oil on Canvas Panel, 2022, 33.5 x 21.5 cm
The Diving Instructor I, Oil on Board, 2022, 60 x 29.5 cm
The Diving Instructor II, Oil on Board, 2022, 60 x 29.5 cm
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, Throwing things across the table, Oil on canvas, 110 x 151 cm
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, A picnic with fruit we ate, Oil on panel, 24 x 24 cm
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, Uninvited (to my own birthday, silly!), 2021, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 157cm
Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne (b. 1994) is a multi-disciplinary artist and painter from Cape Town. She completed her Masters in Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2020. Since then, she is a part time painting lecturer at UCT, founder of Aduc Art Education and private art educator. Labuschagne currently lives in Cape Town and works from her home studio. Her paintings are spontaneous and whimsical visualisations which largely manifests in forms of oil and water colour paintings.
Playing her pastel palette like the pied piper, Emily wanders into a world of nostalgia chasing the ephemeral sensations of childhood to wherever they lead. Dreamy recollections, that with every remembrance, have the potential to shape shift into the world of the reimagined, the reinvented.
An initial daubing of paint on the canvas, the blocking out of colours, set the scene for Emily to discover the details as she works, the images emerging like shapes taking form in the clouds. Deeply rooted within her work and intimated by her pastel tones (a reduction of saturated colour) lies the concept of echoes, of an impression left over from a moment in time, no longer in technicolour but indelible, nonetheless. And then come the words. The surface naiveté of her paintings: the playfulness of sprinklers in a garden on a summer’s day, a pastel inner tube floating in a pool, a pretty poodle, or a tumbling confectionery, hold beneath their innocent layer of frosting and delight, a deeper and sometimes darker sense of the world hinted at by the interplay of her images with their titles. With each word comes the whisper of a story: tales of whimsy touched with sorrow, of innocence giving way to experience, of life walking hand in hand with death. The melancholy of moments that are lost and the anticipation of moments yet to come.
The things that disappear that are never truly gone and the things that remain that were never truly here.
By Lindsay Klein