Notes

Freida Lock, a founder member of the New Group in Cape Town in 1938, is best-known for painting still lifes with flowers, domestic interiors, and Zanzibari portraits and street scenes. Unlike many of the still lifes which show the front view of a jug or vase of a single type of flower – lilies, hydrangeas, or daisies, typically – the present lot depicts a bowl of mixed flowers on a table, viewed directly from above. The bright array of pink, purple, orange, yellow and white blooms is offset by a bright blue and white plaid tablecloth against an acid yellow background, with a pile of postcards, letters or books off to the right, Berman notes that Lock ‘seemed to enjoy particularly the chalky tone and texture obtained from zinc-white applied in thick impasto; dense areas of cream, pale grey and oyster pink as well as unadulterated white itself are regular features of her paintings … and [her] artistic sensibility proclaims itself in her sure eye for the dramatic colour accent ... and contrasts which animate the scene’.¹

1. Esmé Berman (1983) Art & Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: AA Balkema, page 268.

Provenance