Abstract artist Emma Velde Schaffer graduated from the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996, and completed a Master of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney in 1999. Emma has completed numerous private and commercial painting commissions and has been represented at Morgan Street Gallery, Auckland, the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu (the Art Event Auction), the Kunsthandel Galerie, Amsterdam, SCAPE Women in Art Auction, The Linwood Arts & Eastside Gallery and the Art Library, Wellington.

For Emma, inspiration is bound by two primary parameters: the circle and the surface, both at the end from a very long transition from the landscape. In her work, affinities can be detected with the poetic colour fields of Gretchen Albrecht, and the elaborately textured surfaces of Louise Fong. Her painterly surfaces with their delicate and lush layering of colour and texture evoke undersea environments, coral reefs, galactic nebulae, but most importantly a kind of meditative emotional inscape. This effortless complexity is reflected in the diversity of the media: ink, paint, water and gesso – each has its own liquid behaviours, densities and viscosities.

“My current work is drawn from my background in landscape painting and inspired by stills from drone footage of my local Southshore in Ōtautahi. The raw vulnerability of Ōtautahi’s Southshore spit has become a constant presence in the life of myself and my family since our relocation here in 2017. Living, sandwich-like between two bodies of water has been an extraordinary inspiration to my recent practice.” – Emma Velde Schaffer