A painting is a diary

Tobi talks about art the way other people talk about survival. A painting, he says, is a diary, a record of what you've lived, what you've lost, what you've loved. Every piece holds a moment of you.

He learned that slowly. He worked in Holland for years. When he came back, the Free State hit him differently. The colours were almost aggressive after all that grey, the clarity of the sky, the texture of the veld, the particular quality of light that exists nowhere else.

Now he walks the veld every day. Not to photograph it, to interpret it. He comes back to the studio carrying an impression, a feeling more than an image, and he paints that. The translation between what he saw and what ends up on canvas is where Tobias lives.

Tourists walk into the gallery in Clarens, having spent the morning doing exactly what he did. They walked, looked and felt something they couldn't name.

Then they see it in his studio.

That's why he paints. Not to show people what the landscape looks like. To show them what it felt like, and to give them a way to take that feeling home.