WE ARE MOVING! This is where you will find us from now on

We are very excited! We have upgraded to our new website with our blog inside the site. 

That means that you now have access to content about our Style & Stories Portrait Portfolio, professional portraits, event and product photography located on our website. 

We will therefore not be posting any more content on this site. 

Please add our MVNP blog to your RSS feed and stay up to date with our latest projects and information that will help us help you to present your company's and your personal brand in the best possible light.

See you there!

BUSINESS PORTRAIT # 7 : Angela Greyling of VisionWorx at Xtraordinary Women, Somerset West

BY ERIKA

Feel the fear ... and do it anyway!

That was the message of guest speaker Angela Greyling of VisionWorx at the Xtraordinary Women’s Somerset West chapter September breakfast event last week.

In this manic society we live in, we often confuse success with being busy.

The way to test whether that which we keep ourselves busy with, is if it is making a real impact on our own lives, the lives of others and the world around us. Life is not about being productive, it is about being of value.

She quoted author of Success Intelligence, Robert Holden to not confuse:

• speed with progress
• urgency with importance
• adrenaline with purpose

It's not about working harder - It's about removing the obstacles.

And our busy-ness is based in fear, those scripts / assumptions we have been brought up with and have assimilated throughout our lives.

Angela presented participants with four practical ways of how to ‘hold’ their fears from a place of self-power:

• Stop talking yourself into fear
• Act as if you are not afraid
• Reframe your picture of fear
• Make a point of remembering the last time you were brilliant

Angela explains that she has been drawn to people, their behaviours and emotions, and a desire to develop individuals. She studied a BA degree in Industrial Psychology at Rhodes University before working in the distance learning environment as a student advisor, then as a recruitment consultant. She eventually became a business woman, first as the owner of a training consultancy and then a florist shop.

Her interest in psychology also led her to being trained as a Life Line counsellor and more recently completing a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Coaching Practitioner Certification Course. 

More images of the event can be viewed on the Xtraordinary Women Facebook-page.  

THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR STYLE STORY DURING WOMEN'S MONTH 2014! #MVNPStyleStory

We expect that we will soon be painting the town red with Desiree Naude of Somerset West, the winner of our Women's Month 2014 Share Your Style Story Competition!

Desiree's choice of option 2 (when in doubt, follow designer Bill Blass' advice and wear red!) has won her a three-hour Style and Stories Portrait Portfolio shoot including make-up by Candice Harker worth R2 500.

We look forward to telling Desiree's story soon. 

As usual, we will post the images on the blog so add us to your RSS feed.

Thanks to everyone who entered our competition. We really enjoyed learning more about you through your style story! And now we are very keen to also tell your story in style.

Call us to book a Style and Stories Portrait Portfolio shoot!

For more information and prices write to office@shuftipics.co.za or call 072 3553 264.

We look forward to telling your story in style!

SPRINGTIME, SEPTEMBER 2014

Style & Stories Portrait Portfolio: Marnelle

Photographer: Martin Van Niekerk Photography

MUA: Candice Harker 

WOMEN'S MONTH PORTRAIT # 3: Diana Rankin - Fascinated by Fragrance

BY ERIKA

If there is one thing Diana Rankin, perfumista en Somerset West business owner, seems to understand intuitively, it is arte-vita or how to imbue life with art.

Early in the previous century, an Italian art and social movement called the Futurists ¹⁾ had appropriated this phrase, art-life, for the sensory revolution they envisioned. They wanted to empower and liberate society by infusing art into everyday life and into everyday practices. The leader Marinetti, believed that we think, dream and act according to what we eat and drink. Food should engage every sense and stir the imagination.²⁾

THE ART OF FRAGRANCE

For the Futurists it was food and for the owner of Perfume Power South Africa, it all starts with the art of fragrance.

Diana has had a lifelong fascination with everything to do with perfume and as so often happens, the desire to share her passion and knowledge, grew into a business. 

In 2011 she launched her company to educate, entertain and make uncommon fragrances from all over the world available to men and women.

The vehicles she uses are Perfume Power SA's  e-commerce website, presentations at workshops and at private and corporate functions as well as exhibiting at network events (Diana is the chapter leader of the Somerset West chapter of Xtraordinary Women), conferences, expos and wellness days.

One of the very special services is the three-hour personalised Signature Scent Session where you are guided to blend your own masterpiece.

SCENT ROOM

But it is the recent launching of The Scentroom in a quiet cul-de-sac in Somerset West that reminded me of the Futurists’ ideas of arte-vita and their notion of sensory elaboration and combination to create a feast of sensory awareness.

As with the Futurists who made olfaction the ‘star of the gastronomic experience’ ³⁾, every sensation in The Scentroom brings your focus back to fragrance. 

The sound of running water in the beautiful garden, the tactility of fabric and bead work, the colours chosen for the walls, the reflections of candle light from the exquisite perfume bottles displayed on glass shelves, the feeling of body and soul relaxing in the easy chairs, the touch of perfumed oil or wax on the skin. It all has one objective only and that is to enhance your smelling experience and by implication your emotional experience. 

The relationship between smelling and memory is a very special one.⁴⁾  

While it is impossible to recall a smell without the source of it present 5), smells, more than any other sense, triggers memories of situations, contexts and people.

And the memories evoked at The Scentroom have to be special.

“Rather than a sleek and shiny sales room, I wanted to create an airy, peaceful and comfortable environment where people can have an emotional experience but also receive accurate product information so that they will find their perfect perfume match! “ says Diana.

So if you are looking to buy something special for yourself or a friend, if you can get together up to 10 friends to join you for a Signature Scent Workshop, or even if you just being in the moment in a beautiful space, give Diana a call and make an appointment for a scentationalist encounter at The Scent Room.

NOTES

1.    Futurism / Futurists

2.    The Futurist Cook Book

3.    Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

4.    Ibid

5.    Ibid ‘The paradoxical objectivity of smell is that it is more intruding, more immediate, than any other sensation, and at the same time essentially fleeting and elusive. Its presence is never permanent. Not even when that which emits it is present in its materiality is it possible to remain attentive to the smell…. Smell does not permit the continuous examination and enrichment of the first impression which we take for granted, when it comes to the other senses…. The nose must continue to act incessantly, without being able to store the impression. The impression does not become more dense, it is not solidified as when we concentrate on a tone or a color. It is always evaporating.' Ruin, Hans (198?) Smell--Notes for a Phenomenology of Olfaction, Kris:138-41

1. WOMEN'S MONTH 2014 PORTRAIT # 1: Faith Solomon Helps People Have Better Stories
2. WOMEN'S MONTH 2014 PORTRAIT # 2: Merissa Slingerland's Art From The Heart

See also: 

1. PERFUME POWER TO THE PEOPLE - Land n Sand Digital Magazine Nov/Dec 2013 issue

STYLE & STORIES PORTRAIT PORTFOLIO: Daneel

BY ERIKA

She can dance, she can sing, she can act ... and she can organise.

Not only is Daneel Van Wyk the current secretary of the Hottentots Holland Dramatic Society, she has also directed (Bevange in 2013) and worked as the production secretary for the HHDS’ most recent and hugely successful production of Annie.

And always with a smile on her face!

Daneel who grew up in Kimberley, studied drama at the University of the Free State before finding her way to the Western Cape and the Playhouse Theatre, the home of HHDS.

Watch this space! Daneel’s talent and her dreams are as big as her smile.

This is definitely not the last time you will see her in the spot light!  

WOMEN'S MONTH 2014 PORTRAIT # 2: Merissa Slingerland's Art From The Heart

BY ERIKA 

Martin and I would often walk past a lovely old house in Diaz Street in Strand North.

It is a real old-fashioned strandhuis which has grown in a higgledy-piggledy manner as the need for more space arose until it now consists of a brick and mortar core with several wooden lean-to structures.

At the back, even a caravan has attached itself to the house like a barnacle as if it had once come down to the beach for a holiday and just never left.

And every time we walked past we would mention how great it would be to spend time exploring the huge, overgrown and rather old fashioned garden with its magnolia and mulberry trees and ivy climbing up and over the perimeter walls built from smooth river stones.

And so it happened that the wish was granted last year when artist and teacher, Merissa Slingerland moved her art school there.

Since then I have spent many a summer evening in this magical garden, or otherwise inside the old house, making art, drinking wine and enjoying the good company of a great art teacher and other creative people there.

Rather than a very formal set-up, art classes with Merissa is more like a social event where you also learn to get better at something we all love doing – being creative!

The classes cover all media including drawing, panting, sculpture, printing and pottery.

You don’t need any previous experience to join and although everyone starts off drawing, later you choose whatever medium you prefer and you develop at you own pace.

From time to time Merissa prepares a formal lesson e.g. on different  styles or art forms, sometimes she organises a model for live drawing but mostly she helps, guides and cajoles us in her gentle way, to try new media, techniques etc.

And once or twice a year we all exhibit our works at a gallery or tother appropriate venue. 

ART FROM THE HEART

Merissa, who has been teaching art to people from all ages in the Helderberg area for eight years and before that in Rustenburg for three years, is herself an accomplished artist having exhibited upcountry and locally at Rialto in Strand.

She studied fine art at the Vaal Triangle Technikon (now the North-West University Vaal Triangle Campus) and worked as a graphic artist in London, Edinburgh and locally.

“I enjoy working with a variety of media and I love using expressionistic colours and images to take the observer into another world,” she says.

Her artistic style is a combination of media in earthy and bright colours. Rather than directly representing the world in a naturalistic manner, her work expresses an inner experience through a variety of organic textures, lines and forms.

Merissa also enjoys the technical challenges of printing media.

Interested in viewing Merissa’s art? 

Want to commission a work for your home or office?

Feel like joining her art classes?

Call 084 548 5441 or email her at merissaland@gmail.com 

Visit her Facebook page and have a look at the activities Merissa Singerland Artist & Teacher offers adults and children including the popular art parties in the garden.