Natascha Sastra: Review by Anthony Fawcett “Life is like a timeless second” is a statement I could relate to in the work of the Dutch artist Natascha Sastra. She is a portait painter par excellence, who’s ouevre breacks all boundaries,...
Read MoreNatascha Sastra: Review by Anthony Fawcett
“Life is like a timeless second” is a statement I could relate to in the work
of the Dutch artist Natascha Sastra. She is a portait painter par excellence,
who’s ouevre breacks all boundaries, with paint dripping of the canvas,
sometimes with a sence of terror. I think she likes to paint the dark side of
life? I kept thinking of Lou Reed’s iconic song ‘Walk on the wild side!’’.
The oil paint portraits are very visceral, in your face, demanding, and slightly
surrealistic, especially the paintings of the babies, which put me in mind of
Stanley Kurbick’s ‘The Shining’.
Looking at her work I was reminded of Marcel Proust, who wrote: “But seperated
as I was by a whole lifetime from places I know happened to be pasing through
again……we have preceived in it the delicious and total deflagration of memory”
(In Search lost of time, Volume 4)
Sastra’s paintings in a way prevoke her predecessors: “Honey Honey’ I can’t
help thinking of Vermeer’s “Girl With the Pearl Earring’, also ofcourse a Dutch
painter.
Natascha Sastra is a painter who does not shy away from taking on difficult
subjects, and in her portraiture, I see a shining light, hopefully proud to
follow in the tradition of her illustrious Dutch masters.
Anthony Fawcett
