Voigt biography
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LEIGH VOIGT
(b. 1943 Johannesburg, South Africa
Leigh Voigt is a South African artist best known for her studies of trees, birds, cattle and small wild creatures. She studied at the Johannesburg School of Art and worked for an advertising agency between 1962 and 1968. From then onwards her career has been dedicated to art.
The wildlife studies executed by Voigt have great sensitivity and are remarkable for their wonderful use of colour. Voigt concentrates on the patterns that identify various creatures – the spots on the guinea fowl, the stripes of the francolin – rather than delineating all their scientific details.
Voigt’s first solo exhibition took place in 1967 at the Lloys-Ellis Gallery. Since then, she has held numerous successful solo shows and participated in selected group exhibitions throughout South Africa and abroad, many of them with the Everard Read group.
The way Voigt’s work conveys the essence of the creatures she portrays, has led to
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Author Biography
Childhood
My parents had five children, three girls first and then, a few years later - long enough so that their older children could baby sit the younger - twin boys. My father was not a poker player, but he liked to say he had a full house, three queens and two jacks.
I was the second girl. In the photograph, I am the one on the right, whose overalls are slipping off her shoulder, whose socks are crumpling down, who looks disorganized and is A Worry to her older sister, who is sitting next to her trying to get her to shape up for the photograph.
I had the kind of childhood all the middle-class children of my time enjoyed. It was mostly about school, starting with nursery school, and lessons - piano lessons, ballet and tap lessons, a couple of horseback riding lessons, tennis lessons, ballroom dancing classes; there were typing lessons, eventually, which I did like, and no art lessons since everybody knew it was worth nobody's time or money to try to teach m
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HAROLD VOIGT
HAROLD VOIGT
(b. 1939 Johannesburg, South Africa, d. 2022 Johannesburg, South Africa)
Harold Voigt was born in 1939 and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa. He studied architecture before embarking on a brief career in advertising and film making. In 1971 he decide to man paintings his full-time yrke. He designed and built a home on a mountain in the eastern Lowveld of the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa, where he lived and worked with his wife, Leigh, also an artist. He participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and held several one-person exhibitions, most of them at Everard Read.
A painter of landscapes, abstract works and the human figure, Voigt concentrated on textural qualities, light and colour derived from the African Landscape. He used a wide range of mixed-media techniques, incorporating sand, marble dust, wax and oil. From 1974, he painted a series entitled "The Animal in Africa"; from 1975-79 "The African Landscape"