Notes

Hugo Naudé, South Africa’s quintessential impressionist painter, was captivated by the western Cape’s splendid sun-drenched Namaqualand region, as year after year in spring the semi barren landscape burst into an array of splendid blooms. After travelling in Europe and studying at the Slade School in London and then the Kunstakademie in Munich, and gaining exposure to the latest avant garde trends in Paris, Naudé returned to settle in Worcester in the Western Cape. He found his metier painting en plein air as he masterfully created evocative images with a fascination for capturing the transient quality of the landscape rather than its details, the sensory rather than the representational. Naudé brilliantly captures the atmospheric sensation of the dazzling yellow and orange wildflowers that carpet the fields. With each daub of paint he creates the impression of an individual flower as he movingly exposes the transience of the seasons, the flowers, the light and shadow. In contrast, he washes the surrounding rocks and mountains with seemingly liquid broad-brush strokes in subtle shades of luminous pale blue, green, grey and orange that create the sense of the floral surrounds reflecting off the rocks in the glistening light.