Notes

Unusually sparse for Stanley Pinker, whose canvasses are often crowded with interesting and contradictory images of a topsy-turvy colonial and post-colonial South Africa, this landscape is no less complex in composition and in conceptual intent. Represented in a couple of broad brushstrokes and horizontal bands of colour, the artist manages to suggest an expansive coastal line of sand, sea and sky, with a small green tent embedded in a veritable knot of sand dunes. The green tent, seemingly arbitrarily placed in Pinker's composition is emblematic of the artist's dominant presence and appears sporadically in Pinker's work, most notably in a work titled "Once upon a time there was…" The work adorns the cover of the Pinker monograph, published by Michael Stevenson in 2004, and represents, according to Pinker, a strong sense of "being there". As a result, the present landscape has a special significance. According to Pinker, he often found inspiration in drawings and ideas, which, he goes on to say, "become paintings which are meant to be LOOKED at: they are visual experiences, using the traditional elements of paintings, where I see the structural organisation of a surface every bit as important as its colour." ¹

1. Esmé Berman. (1983) Art & Artists of South Africa: An illustrated bibliographical dictionary and historical survey of painters, sculptors & graphic artists since 1875, Cape Town: A. A. Balkema publishers. Page 336.

Provenance

Purchased by the current owner from Gallery International, Cape Town, June 1971