Art appeals in hospitality

Artworks have long been a main feature across the hospitality industry. A current trend, seen at the new Pot Luck Club & Gallery restaurant in Cape Town and the Hyatt Regency Oubaai Golf Resort & Spa on the Garden Route is to host artists on a rotating basis. This keeps the artwork current and gives guests to the establishments added value as they get to experience the top quality artwork as well as hospitality offering.

South African born and internationally celebrated sculptor Anton Smit’s work is being exhibited at Hyatt Regency Oubaai Golf Resort & Spa in the heart of the Garden Route. The hotel’s location serves as an ideal backdrop for these works of art, like “Batsheba, the beloved one of David”, which looks like it is quietly contemplating the beautiful gardens and homes on the resort. His works offer a sensory experience, as he combines enormous structural mastery to fine detail. Smit loves poetry and says his inspiration to create stems from looking to produce poetry of word and form, as man emulates and assimilates nature.

At the newly opened Pot Luck Club in Woodstock, Cape Town, artwork by Cape Town-based painter Peter Eastman is on display. He is inspired by early man fossil sites like Sterkfontein and his work includes a collection of semi-abstracted and reinterpreted landscapes. Eastman has spent time restoring antiquities and has exhibited locally and internationally in galleries and at art fairs. His work has been seen around Cape Town and Johannesburg as well as in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy.

The collection of works he is exhibiting at The Pot Luck Club & Gallery, “Buried in Black and White”, takes its title from the main painting triptych which features prominently. It depicts a path in a forest running past a fossil site where the sedimentary layers of rock have been exposed by natural weathering. Fragments lie strewn across the path which recedes into the distance. He explains that the process of making the painting mimicked, to some extent, the process of the burial and subsequent revealing of fossils over time due to the weathering process.