Jonel Scholtz obtained a Baccalaureus Scientiae degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, in 1994.
Her imagination and brain are always in supernova mode – being aware of everything around her and observing every emotion close-by. She therefore uses her keen observation to create ideas for paintings.
"I try to dance to the radio, sing in the shower, eat cake, cry and laugh and laugh and laugh, but most of all love - every day. And that is all I need to do."
Her work is simple and emotional. Intense emotions derived from a happening or even a scene, will be a muse. Every time she sits in front of her canvas she feels the need to create a painting that conveys her emotions with the same intensity she experiences them: pure and true. No pretense can survive on a canvas.
Her interior paintings create domestic scenes in hues conveying intensely subjective and evocative interior spaces. The frames she includes in her paintings – mostly doorways and windows – call attention to rites of passage and socialization and the gendered organization of space.
While clearly figurative, her paintings’ expressive qualities evoke the safety and comfort of the ideal home in our collective imagination.
Her figurative works are more about interpreting an emotion than it is to convey an image. Her nudes express the fragility of the female form. This comes from a struggle she has had with her body for years. As a teenager she had anorexia and an unbalanced image of what the world expects from her. She explains: “ I still have this unhealthy relationship with food and my body, but as I matured, I have learned to express these feelings in my paintings with a shift in focus to the sexuality and beautiful form of the female body.”
She started painting in 1988, while in high school, with Louise Goudemond, an American born artist, specializing in figurative work and oil portraits.
- 2018 - artist residency at Tamarin Art Centre, Mauritius