LiziV’s Art

Vendor Biography

Artist Biography: Liezel van Deventer

Rooted in South Africa’s vibrant creative lineage, Liezel van Deventer’s journey has been shaped by generous mentorship and a steadfast devotion to craft. Early guidance from Mike Parsons, a student of Adrian Boshoff, opened her eyes to atmosphere, light, and the tender drama of everyday moments. The celebrated Christa Myburgh continues to mentor Liezel, nurturing a practice that balances discipline with fearless experimentation, while Shirley Howells deepened her command of oil techniques. Further study through Artefacto’s online art school broadened Liezel’s technical vocabulary and reinforced her instinct for expressive, tactile painting.

Recognition arrived with inclusion in Portchie’s gallery exhibition in 2011, a milestone that was followed by showings in several Pretoria galleries, spirited days at the Bruma Lake and Klipklap art markets, and a dedicated exhibition in Hazelwood, now the Atterbury Theatre. These encounters brought her into warm conversation with audiences who found, in her paintings, sincerity and a resonant emotional core.

Impressionism is her ground, looseness her language, impasto her delight. Trained in oil, acrylic, and watercolour, Liezel spent recent years exploring the translucence of watercolour before returning to her first love, oil, now often woven with acrylic to create mixed media surfaces that breathe. The paint is worked with confidence and generosity, favouring atmosphere over exactness, gesture over fuss, feeling over finery.

People and nature remain her constant muses. She paints mindfully, with gratitude for small graces and the shimmering beauty of ordinary hours. In recent seasons, women have come to the fore of her practice. These are not idealised figures, but presences, portraits of strength and tenderness where dignity, vulnerability, and courage share the same space. Colour leads the conversation, harmonies and slight dissonances guiding the eye, while composition uses negative space and decisive strokes to invite quiet reflection.

The result is a body of work that feels immediate yet reflective, shaped by years of practice and enlivened by spontaneity. Each canvas carries a touch of memory and a sense of becoming, as if the paint itself were thinking.

I warmly invite you to wander through this gallery, to linger with each painting, and to experience the beauty that lives behind every piece.