Notes

Commissioned from Cecil Skotnes by the architect, Derek Holthausen, specifically for the Spiro family home in Durbanville, Communication was completed and installed in 1966. This square, carved wooden panel is typical of the work featured on his Retrospective Exhibition, 1956 to 1972 at the Pretoria Art Museum in March/April 1972.

Writing in that introduction Egon Guenther notes; “Very few South African artists have been able to establish an artistic form of expression which is not only personal, but also captures the spirit of our own complex age”.¹

Skotnes entered his first wood panel into the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1959 and made an impact on the artworld with his unique symbolism and novel use of materials. His graphic sensibility, driven by the Wits Group of which he was an active member, led him from print-making with woodblocks to producing oversized carved wooden panels.

As Pippa Skotnes writes “By the 1960s the potential of the block itself as the significant component of the image, rather than as a mere substrate for the print began to prevail. Cecil slowly turned his attention to producing panels which were no longer intended to produce prints, but which were rather to be incised and painted as images themselves”.² 

Talking about his development from the print to the object, Guenther observes; “The grey-white backgrounds gradually changed to browns and ochres, and from ochres earthen reds and sandy yellows. The dormant colour sense of the painter Skotnes awakened and demanded equal share. The sombre and subdued colours brightened. The black contours made way for glowing reds, and orange and white on umber and orchre backgrounds”.³

1 Egon Guenther. Cecil Skotnes Retrospective: 1956 to 1972. Art Museum Pretoria, March/April 1972.

2 Pippa Skotnes in Frieda Harmsen, (ed) 1996. Cecil Skotnes. Cape Town, Tricolor Press.

3 Ibid.