JOHANNESBURG
RSA
While poring over skate magazines as a youngster, the brightly coloured, lowbrow art of Ed Templeton, Barry McGee and Chris Johannson caught the attention of a certain Maaike Bakker, as accessible, unpretentious and abnormal. It is perhaps for this reason that Maaike’s illustration draws inspiration from mundane, silly and irrelevant things today. Maaike is a talented local artist, currently completing her masters in in Visual Art, while lecturing illustration. Maaike’s “mundane” subject matter ranges from a line of a song stuck in her head, to a childhood toy or an awkwardly phrased headline on a poster. Two distinctive aspects of Maaike’s illustrative style are her unique use of colour and pattern. Maaike explains,
“An illustration can so easily become ‘another picture’. We are constantly bombarded with images, which Is why I try to use awkward colours to challenge the representational”.