Ann Gadd facilitates art workshops entitled "Create Yourself" and "Art Work", as well as teaching Reiki. She lives with her family in Cape Town South Africa. She has studied, counselled and treated people, using a variety of healing disciplines for over 15 years during which time, she has gained some profound insights as to the root causes of habits and how to heal and change for the better.

History of EWE

I had been painting seriously since 1997 - mostly landscapes, still lives etc in bright expressionistic colours. I painted my first sheep in 2002 (see below) It was called The sheep who studied astrology. I enjoyed doing it, so later that year painted a couple of versions of Ambitious sheep. They sold, however never really gave them too much thought, until 2006 when I had hit the creative doldrums. It was a freezing day, rain pouring down, and I kept hearing this inner voice saying “paint sheep, paint sheep, and I’m like “yeah right people are going to want paintings of sheep!” Anyhow decided what the hell and so painted my first two sheep. I took them to a well known art gallery/dealer who loved them. I did seven more and took them to another gallery who snapped them up. Four days later they called and said they had sold those and asked for more. The rest as they say is history!
-Ann Gadd

The Life of Ewe

I often get asked: “Why sheep?” Here is my explanation.
Sheep in their inane conformist lifestyle have much to mirror to us about the human condition.
Eat, sleep, shit, toil, die for a purpose that remains beyond their (and our) deeper understanding. Like sheep we seldom stop to question our life, its purpose and the validity of what we do. Struggling to achieve a stable patch for ourselves and yet being ever threatened by the inevitable tumble downhill, in the repetitive conformism of our lives, sheep become icons for our own insanity. From their lofty phallic heights, (to which we in a post paternalistic male dominated society have raised them), sheep set themselves up for an inevitable fall.
Observing people respond to sheep paintings, I have noticed that they cut across racial, religious, gender and age boundaries - we can all relate to their (and our) absurdity in blindly following.
Through Ewe, I examine the life of you/ewe the observer, and hope, through humour, to get ewe/you the viewer, to question why you do what you do and push you to challenge your beliefs and understanding of reality.