Notes

In the original artist’s Zanzibar frame.

Freida Lock is best-known for her interiors and still-life studies, but her range of subject matter was much broader. Her early interiors and still-life studies, painted about the time she was a founder member of the New Group in 1938, members of which included such artists as Gregoire Boonzaier, Terence McCaw, Lippy Lipshitz in the Cape, and Walter Battiss up North, are the most sought after on auction. The present lot, a group of three squatting Arab figures, signals that her figure studies are not as uncommon as previously thought. During her lengthy stay in Zanzibar in 1947–49, she completed many portraits of Arab sitters. Inevitably these invite comparison with those of Irma Stern, who visited Zanzibar as early as 1939 and again in 1945. The resemblance between these artists’ goes beyond that of subject matter; Lock also framed her paintings in the same type of carved wood examples that Stern used in the 1930s and 40s.

Lock’s portraits and figure studies, nevertheless, can hold their own in the company of Stern’s. Lock’s work stems from a different sensibility. Lock studied in London at the Heatherley School of Art and at the Central School of Art in the early 1930s, rather conservative institutions at the time, and her work is unlike the early work of such contemporary artists as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. There is no lack of personality, however, in Lock’s work. There is certainly a vitality in the manner in which she portrays her figures. The vitality is also evident in Lock’s use of colour. She clearly found physical delight in the touch of the brush on canvas and often her canvases are crusty as a result of the use of thick oil paint. She seemed to enjoy the chalky tones obtained from zinc white applied in thick impasto. Undulated white surfaces are clearly visible in the present lot. But her forte resides in the colourful patterns of the carpet in the foreground.