Within South Africa we courier your artwork to your door - the shipping cost will show at the checkout.
When shipping art internationally, two primary options are commonly considered: crated and rolled. Crating involves securely packaging the artwork in a custom-built crate, providing maximum protection against physical damage but often resulting in higher shipping costs due to size and weight. On the other hand, rolling art involves taking stretched paintings off the frame, carefully wrapping the artwork and placing it in a protective tube. This method is more cost-effective and suitable for flexible pieces. Choosing between crating and rolling depends on the specific artwork's size, fragility, and budget, as well as the destination's shipping requirements and regulations.
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Virtual hanging of art is an innovative service we offer that allows art enthusiasts and collectors to visualize how artworks will appear in their desired spaces before making a purchase. We digitally place the selected artworks on your walls, in the correct scale to achieve the desired aesthetic. This service not only helps in making informed decisions but also enhances the overall art-buying experience, providing a realistic preview of the final result and ensuring that the chosen artworks harmonize with the surrounding decor. Please contact us to make use of this service!
This work is inspired by Mawu, the major creator deity of Fon and related Ewe traditions, associated with the moon, night, motherhood, creation and balance. The painting approaches Mawu not as a literal narrative figure, but as a quiet, contemplative presence whose stillness reflects her cosmic power.
The composition is intimate and asymmetrical. The figure is shown in profile with her head gently lowered, creating a sense of inward reflection and calm restraint. This downward gesture suggests humility, care and maternal tenderness, while the isolation of the figure against the textured ground gives her a sacred presence. Rather than dominating the space through scale or action, she holds it through poise and silence, which relates strongly to Mawu’s association with the night and with the quieter, cooler side of creation.
Texture plays a central role in the work. The layered, weathered and fractured surface evokes ancient walls, earth and time-worn ritual spaces. The drips and abrasions running across the face suggest both erosion and emergence, as if the figure is being formed from the surface itself. This speaks to Mawu’s role as a creator deity: creation is presented not as a single event, but as a gradual unfolding.
The palette is dominated by charcoal, ash-grey, deep brown and black, with accents of rust, red and turquoise. These darker tones evoke moonlit darkness, mystery and the unseen world of night. The cooler grey field creates a sense of stillness and balance, while the warmer rust and red tones introduce life, energy and emotional depth. Turquoise offers a subtle counterpoint, suggesting spirit, renewal and cosmic harmony.
In its execution, the work combines detailed portraiture with abstraction, allowing the figure to exist between the human and the divine. In Mawu, balance is expressed through contrast: light and dark, softness and fracture, stillness and movement. The result is an image of quiet creation, maternal power and sacred equilibrium.
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Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons was born in 1966 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. Alongside his visual art practice, he runs a graphic design studio and works as a historian and author. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a National Higher Diploma in Graphic Design from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He has had two solo exhibitions, titled Nutria, related to his PhD research at the Castle of the Cape of Good Hope (2017), and at the University of Pretoria (2018), and is an awardwinning author of poetry and short fiction.
Symons’s artistic practice engages the tradition of portraiture as a layered and contested archive rather than a fixed representation of identity. His works challenge the notion of the portrait as a complete and permanent record, instead presenting the face as something constructed through processes of accumulation, erasure, and revision.
Working entirely in a digital medium, Symons creates images that echo the visual language of classical painting and illustration. His compositions often draw on the structure and balance of Old Master portraiture, while his painterly surfaces are built through a highly tactile digital process using a pressure-sensitive tablet. Drips, textures, and gestures are rendered with precision, resulting in works that carry the depth and immediacy of physical paint. It is not uncommon for a single image to consist of over 100 layers, each contributing to a complex interplay of colour, texture, and visual depth.
The richly textured surfaces of his works function as visual palimpsests, built up and reworked to reveal traces of earlier stages. This process reflects his interest in the way history is continually rewritten, with the past remaining present through fragments and residues. By referencing classical portrait conventions while simultaneously disrupting them, Symons questions ideas of visibility, memory, and who is remembered.
Through fragmentation and material tension, his work reflects the complexity of identity and historical truth, inviting the viewer to consider the portrait not as a fixed image, but as an evolving record shaped over time.
Stephen Symons is in South Africa exclusively represented by The Artists Gallery in Cape Town and will show 2026 for the first time internationally with The Travelling Art Gallery.
