Notes

Laubscher is best known for his landscapes depicting parts of the Overberg, Swartland, Koue Bokkeveld and Northern Cape in geometrical bands of bold colour. He came to know these areas as a travelling paint salesman and through painting trips with his wife, painter Claude Bouscharain, and close friend, painter Stanley Pinker. Laubscher’s earliest landscapes shunned perspective and verisimilitude – key attributes of modernist European painting. Laubscher came to realise that European painterly styles were inadequate for conveying South Africa’s landscapes. Over time he developed a highly colloquial style characterised by the artist’s commitment to visualising his emotional response to actual places in the land. Painted when Laubscher was 68, this work shows the artist’s later-career return to perspective and pictorial detail. His painting describes the effects of geological time on the landscape, notably the deep riverine incisions made by the Buffels River, at 9000 km2 the largest ephemeral river in Namaqualand. His dark clouds further underscore the effects of water on the landscape. Burnt red and purple, the colours of twilight, dominate his composition. Unlike Pierneef or Goodman, earlier observers of the effects of light on mountain landscapes, Laubscher amplifies the emotion of this radiance to register his awe of the sublime. “We are engulfed in light, very much aware of space and the continuity of the land, which extends beyond our vision,” Laubscher once said. “The artist must have a definite oneness with this magnitude.”¹

^1. Stephen Gray (1970) ‘Erik Laubscher and Landscape’, in Lantern, March, Vol. XIX, No. 3, page 14.

Provenance

Dr Matthys Johannes Strydom Family Collection.