This artist combines poetry with art. Indeed you will find short verses discreetly hidden in a sky, or  perhaps a field scene, and each (the poetry and the art) compliments each other. Hanlie, of Rustenburg, says she started writing poetry at school and that she has always been fascinated by the interpolation of what could be called word art and her visual art, now increasingly moving to acrylics from water colours.

She grew up in a home in Aliwal North where her father Kobus Kotze was an artist and art gallery owner and still maintains a small gallery in Bloemfontein.  Hanlie's mother is also an artist.  From her gallery in Rustenburg, she produces a mixture between surrealistically naïve and expressionistic art, perhaps best described as almost lyrical and she favours symbolism in all her paintings to blend with the poetry she is divining as she works away at the easel.

Art is essentially an expression of mood and when you combine it becomes even more so." Hanlie hastens to point out that she doesn't compose realms of verse: rather the occasional phrase here, a word coupling there just to help her capture the very mood she wants to convey by the painting.  But she gets enormously absorbed in her work although she happily concedes that her small boy and daughter is a delightful distraction.

"Painting and poetry say the same thing," she says. "I feel both are a reflection of your creative abilities and the marriage of the two is very natural." Hanlie has been painting professionally for nearly 10 years and so she has obviously hit on a winning combination.  She is now rated among the pantheon of well-known South African artists who can hold their own anywhere in the world and her work is beginning to reflect a real investment value.