Cecil Skotnes: Head - SOLD
Cecil Skotnes
Head
Carved, incised and painted wood panel
76 x 102 cm
Signed top right
Available
Skotnes’ urge to find individual expression in his art was significantly influenced by his long association with the creative goldsmith, art collector and, later, gallery owner Egon Guenther, whom he met in 1954. Pippa Skotnes writes:
At his suggestion, and with the gift of a set of wood carving tools, Cecil abandoned painting and begun to cut an artistic identity for himself in wood.
She continues: The attraction of woodcutting as a medium to explore the peculiar qualities of the South African landscape must, in part, have resided in its extreme formal and technical difference to oil painting, the traditional European technique used to render the landscape. It was not only an iconographical challenge for an artist who wanted to draw a distinction between the products of Europe and the products of Africa, but a formal one as well. Woodcutting offered Cecil the possibility of finding a new form for the symbolism he increasingly began to attach to a particularly local vision, without having to reject the rich European traditions which initially appealed to him in the landscapes of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, Paul Cézanne and later Scharf and Baumeister. It was undoubtedly initially through the medium of prints, that Cecil was able to produce what later became described as work which had at its core ‘a spirit of Africa’.
Through his position as ‘Recreation Officer’ at the Polly Street Art Centre from 1952 to 1965, Skotnes was instrumental in guiding and assisting some of our most important black sculptors and painters – artists like Sydney Kumalo, Lucas Sithole, Ezrom Legae, Louis Maqhubela, Ephraim Ngatane, Welcome Koboka, Ben Arnold and Durant Sihlali. Kumalo was Skotnes’ assistant from 1957 to 1964, and recognising his great talent as a sculptor, Skotnes arranged for him to work in Edoardo Villa’s studio to receive professional guidance. Although Skotnes later explained that, in his opinion, there was no visual reference to African tribalism evident in the work of the artists active at the Centre, his close involvement with these artists would have allowed for the sub-conscious exposure to their artistic heritage and psychological backgrounds, which could certainly have influenced his iconography.
Bibliography:
Frieda Harmsen, Cecil Skotnes, Cape Town, 1996, pp 20 and 21 (Text by Frieda Harmsen), pp 84 to 86 (Text by Pippa Skotnes)
Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town, 1983, pp 425 and 426
Elza Miles, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre, Johannesburg, 2004, pp 32, 48, 60, 79 and 92
To view the Cecil Skotnes web page click here