Wessel Marais was a South African landscape painter. Born in 1935 in Magaliesburg, South Africa, as a young man, Marais took art lessons from Zakkie Eloff, a famous South African artist who specialized in painting native animals of the veld. Beyond his lessons, the artist found inspiration in the work of an earlier South African painter Erich Mayer, as well as the French Impressionists. Marais painted a wide variety of subjects representing various parts of his rural homeland. “When I’m at work… ,” said the artist, “I am totally absorbed with the intangible elements of the subject matter I try to portray. It is not so much the subject that matters, but the mystic energy floating from it that I try to capture in my oils. Sometimes I think I come close to succeeding in the capture of the indefinable element some people describe as art.” Marais died in April of 2009 in South Africa.
