Marie has a remarkable talent for observation and a technical facility for drawing. These, coupled with her ability to immerse herself in dedicated hard work, determined the road she was to follow, away from the medical pursuits of her family, into the world of art. She was born on 7th May 1954 in Pretoria, South Africa. After completing her school career with a distinction in art, she went on to acquire a B.A. Fine Art at the University of South Africa with a distinction in painting. She also completed a course in portraiture at the Royal Academy in London in 1976, studying under such tutors as George Israels and Kingsley Sutton. Today, she is a highly successful artist whose work is in constant demand. Her work is represented in many private and corporate collections here, in Britain, Europe and the United Stated of America. This success can be ascribed to a combinations of factors her undeniable talent and technical ability, her passion for colour and light, her great empathy for people, her versatility and last but not least, her sharp business acumen. The passion, enthusiasm and vivacity with which she approaches everything in life, have a way of manifesting in her work and infecting all who come into contact with her. With technical virtuosity and a keen sense of line and colour she explored still life, landscape and portraiture, yet in the end, it was the human face and figure that fascinated her most. Her painting reflects a spirit of Romanticism while her pre- occupation with light infuses her style with shades of impressionism. Her canvases create a theatre for the dance of light where all kinds of objects become chunks of colour modelled by light. She succeeds in capturing the romance and poetry, light and shadow, the tenderness and vulnerability of youth in her portraits of young people and children, but can also render with accuracy and incisiveness the portraits of prominent figures in the commercial, political and educational arenas. It is her wildlife paintings that position her as an artist of Africa. She captures the majesty of the animal within the atmosphere of its natural habitat and fascinates the viewer with the harmonies of colour, sunlight and shadow, water and foliage and the rich reflection of the African skies. However, it is always the masterful handling of her medium that captures one’s attention. Colour is applied boldly with palette knife, brush and even fingers, only to be contrasted with areas of supreme subtlety and sensitivity. Ultimately her royalty in everything she paints is to the autonomy of her medium. In her most recent work she returns to her concept of ‘portrait’ and working against her natural facility for creating likeness, she forces herself to omit the human form whilst communicating the essence of the character of the chosen portrait, through the depiction of the interior. In a sense this is a kind of Romantic art in that it deals with the particular the particularity about the habitat of a particular person from a particular social strata of society. Here is a vision that sees an extraordinary significance in the ordinary, making some comment of life besides the comment on appearance. The viewer is never allowed to forget that the work is primarily about people. One could almost call them ‘portraits by omission’