Art over the centuries has been engaged in exploring and producing beauty, but more recently has had a vexed relationship with that concept. In Daniel Blignaut's latest body of work: “A Conversation with Trees”, his work unabashedly aims to achieve aesthetic beauty by evoking a primal fascination with the allure of gold and the aesthetic pleasure of color, pattern and texture — as evident throughout human visual history. Blignaut's process involves making bold aesthetic statements only to soften them with a multitude of layers, which adds to the eventual complexity of the surface. This has the effect of indicating the passage of time on the canvas itself.