Q&A: Portraits of a mid-life

Clare Menck has been painting since she was three years old. With degrees in fine art from Stellenbosch University and UCT, she is an accomplished colourist and realist painter of figures in nature and in interiors.

She has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. Tonight her new solo exhibition opens in Cape Town. She answers our questions:

Why have you stayed with oil painting?

Oil paint is a versatile and difficult medium to deal with - to translate my world and "eye" into visual terms. I haven't tired of trying.

I worked on canvas for years, then gradually switched to working on wood exclusively, which has the advantage of a firm surface and showing the minutest nuances of brushstroke. In Outside In, I make a rather radical (for me) shift back to canvas in the so-called winter series, as opposed to the works on wood of the summer series, after years of not painting on canvas.

How has your work changed over the years?

I used to work in a freer, perhaps more obviously painterly style as a student, and more comfortably and more often on a larger scale, when practical considerations of the marketplace played no role.

Since then I have concentrated on what I perceive to be my forte: realist interpretations of the visual world around me, generally autobiographical in nature, on a small to miniature scale.

Lately I have returned to some of that looseness and freedom of interpretation and style reminiscent of some of my student work.

Why is this exhibition called 'Outside In'?

I started 2014 with an emotional crisis and had some anxiety attacks to deal with and overcome - or learn to live with.

It was a watershed year for me, shortly after another relationship break-up, and I was wading through the river of another mid-life crisis. I became intensely aware of the process of ageing and of approaching death, as well as an anticipation of the imminent "empty nest". This keenly and painfully felt existential crisis defined the creative journey towards Outside In.

I began conceiving my work with the photographic sources of a balmy, but tumultuous, summer, during which the simplest peaceful activities, such as evening walks or picnics near water or swims with my family, made it into my paintings.

These gentle and restorative activities of recuperation in and around various forms of flowing water masses became my so-called summer series for Outside In. However, with the approaching winter this year, I felt the need for a change, a move towards the personal, the interior, perhaps also for an interpretation of the darker realities of human nature: to look back and to explore some seldomly spoken about or shown takes on intimate adult life. I sensed the need for a stylistic shift - for my new, subdued and extremely limited palette, resulting in the so-called winter series of Outside In.

Who are the subjects of your work?

Besides myself - I am an incessant self-portraitist - I most often use my closest family members as models, including my children or friends, colleagues, peers and lovers. They are studies of people, in interiors or landscapes, environments which speak about my interpretation of the subjects' - and my own - inner worlds.

• 'Outside In' opens tonight at Ermann Contemporary in Cape Town and closes on September 26