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Born 1955 | Eastern Cape, South Africa
Artist Anthony Gadd has had a passion for Art from his early school days in the Eastern Cape. A childhood spent roaming farms and interacting with wildlife gave him a deep respect and knowledge about his environment, which he now translates into his South African landscape paintings. Nearly two decades as a commercial artist, creative director, and later director of his own advertising agency, did little to quench this South African artist’s thirst for painting. In between being a dad, deadlines and directing, he used what time he had to explore his fascination with art.
Finally he decided to turn his passion into his career and started focusing on South African art full time in 2004. He hasn’t looked back since. Anthony works from his studio in Cape Town, is married to artist and author Ann and has two children.
Artist Anthony Gadd has an exceptionally rich spectrum of professional and personal experience, abilities and talents to draw from. His experience in design, gleaned from his days as a creative director, has blended well with his instinctive use of a variety of mediums and his ability to draw with unerring accuracy.
In the early stages of his South African art career Anthony Gadd focused on watercolours, with nudes, wildlife and landscapes as his primary subjects. He then explored a unique medium - metal, taking sections of road maps of areas in South Africa. Metal is the building material of the majority of homes in South Africa and consequently perfect to mirror the urban African landscape. The metal’s rust properties gave his South African landscape art an organic and unique appearance.
At first it seemed hard, strange and non-absorbent compared to canvas. As he experimented, he saw the different effects one could obtain, particularly when the unpredictability of rusting areas is involved. Many sheets of metal later, he came to understand this new media and to enjoy its special properties. A large commission for a Gauteng Conference centre was the culmination of this exploration.
Later this South African landscape artist began working in bright dynamic colour combinations in loose landscapes on watercolour paper using acrylic focusing on areas of the Cape, West Coast and Karoo.
More recently he has started combining up to six different mediums, creating richly toned, textural feeling to his subjects which include trees, nudes and landscapes in his art and paintings. He is a skilled draughtsman, and is able to move from realism to abstraction-ism with ease.
Anthony Gadd as an artist has matured from his original, more realistic style to become looser, fresher and more abstract in his later South African Paintings. His fresh approach has appealed to the public and galleries and in a short space of time he has become a very successful artist.
This South African landscape artist won the South African Society of Artists award for best mixed media in their annual exhibition, participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions and is frequently commissioned. Gallery owners and the general public are excited by his unique and dynamic concepts and approach to art, and in a remarkably short space of time he has made an impact on the South African art world. There is a strong demand for his works, which now hang in most top South African galleries.
“I don’t know that artists wholly control the meaning of their work. Meaning accrues. This almost alchemical process motivates a never ending search for fresh magic." – Anthony Gadd on his personal motivation.
