Landscapes (Meyer Uranovsky)

Meyer Uranovsky’s landscape works are less about depicting a place as it appears and more about expressing how it feels. His drawings carry a visceral intensity—charged with emotion, often unsettling, and deeply thought-provoking. Rather than offering a purely scenic view, Uranovsky’s landscapes seem to hold psychological weight, inviting the viewer to sense the atmosphere and inner life of the environment.

There is also a strong thread of memory and identity running through his work. Born in Cape Town to Russian émigré parents and later working in New York, Uranovsky approaches the South African landscape with both familiarity and distance. His images often evoke a sense of longing, as though revisiting a place shaped as much by memory as by direct observation. This dual perspective allows him to reinterpret the landscape as both insider and outsider.

His use of charcoal is central to this expression. The medium lends itself to immediacy and suggests the fleeting and ever-changing nature of the natural world, emphasizing mood and texture over polished realism. The charcoal itself becomes a metaphor for impermanence, memory and the unrefined beauty of the environment.