AGAC Top 25 Finalist - Riana Dippenaar - Spice up the Arts

Top 25 Finalist in the AGAC 2023

- Artist: Riana Dippenaar

- Name: Spice up the Arts

- Size:  1015 mm x 55 mm 

- Medium: Acrylic

- Unframed

- Price: R16,900

Riana is an emerging South African artist, and she has been awarded as a Top 25 Finalist in the ARTi Gallery Art Competition 2023!  

About this piece: 

I see Da Vinci, Van Gogh and Dali as the spice of artists. The ones that brought flavour to the art world. The colour use are mostly red, brown and yellows as those are your most "potent" spices that adds flavour to any meal. These artists surely were the forerunners of the art world. 

About the Artist: 

From a very young age my passion has always been to create through my drawings and paintings. It gave me so much joy to see something beautiful come to life and felt blessed that I was given this God given talent. In high school I received various awards being the best art student. All I wanted to study was Art but was told artists do not make money and decided to study Interior Design at TUT. Shortly after completing my studies I got married and moved to the Northern Cape with my husband. I started designing houses for people in the surrounding towns.

When we moved back to Gauteng, I opened my own Art School teaching pre-, primary-, and high school children. Our local school, High School Erasmus, asked me to become a full-time art teacher where I was teaching Creative arts and Culture for the grade 8’s and 9’s and Visual Arts for the Gr10, 11 and 12 learners. My students performed extremely well and received the highest distinctions and were very often rewarded for being the top students in our district. After 15 years of teaching, I decided to resign at the end of 2022 and became a full-time artist again. It's been almost a year now that I have had the freedom to express myself through my Art.

I am still helping out children through online classes for students in various towns across South Africa and have some classes during the week at home. I am also very proud to say that I had the privilege in working together with the world-famous Anton Smit in his sculpture park. Our town is also covered in numerous murals that I have done over the years. Religion and spirituality play a very important role in my life, and the church commissions me every year to do their theme painting for the year. Which I have been doing for the last 15 years. Coming from a very artistic family, poetry is part of my art, and there is always symbolic meaning to every artwork that I have made. I also believe that when you are creative, you hold hands with God.

I have never had the privilege to exhibit my art works in any gallery and being picked as one of the top 25 artists is an honour. May my love and passion for art never run dry.