Notes

A sense of mystery and wonder surrounds JH Pierneef’s Mountain Landscape captured beautifully in the present lot. What lies behind the bend in the road that disappears behind a flat hill on the right? Where does the road lead? What lies underneath the bank of low-lying clouds in the middle?

Pierneef deviates from his usual placing of his famous voluminous, cumulus clouds in the sky in the background, to the middle ground, below the jaggedly etched shapes of the mountain range in the background. Going to the mountain, travelling on the curved road, would be like going back to nature, a meditative experience. The mystery and wonder could become a spiritual journey. In this sense, the colours – green tones in the foreground, purple and orange in the background – assume a spiritual value. Inadvertently the spiritual nature of art, as expressed by Wassily Kandinsky, springs to mind, suggesting that colour has a psychic effect on human beings as their sense of colour shifts readily from a sensory experience of colour to one with the inner meaning of colour, with the spiritual harmony that colour combinations bring about.<sup>1

1</sup> Wassily Kandinsky (1914)(1977). Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York: Dover Publications, pages 23–26.