HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE STRAUSS & CO MAY ONLINE AUCTION

A CLOSER LOOK AT IMPORTANT SOUTH AFRICAN ARTISTS ON THE SALE

AN ARTICLE BY OLIVIA BARRELL

Personal highlights from Strauss & Co’s May Online Auction, which is open to bidding until 8pm on Monday 1^st June 2020. Looking at artworks through a closer lens.

Nicky Leigh, Malolotja Rocks (Swaziland), Sunset, recto; Landscape with Pawpaw Trees, Unfinished, verso

The very first lot of the sale is a dreamy chalk pastel work by Nichola Alice Leigh, the fourth generation of the Everard Group of female artists. Daughter of the well-known artist Leonora Everard Haden (1937-), whose work is also up for sale on this same auction with the following lot. Leigh was born in 1966 in the Carolina district, an area within South Africa previously called the Eastern Transvaal near the border of Swaziland – a hilly region that had been home to many artists of the Everard Group and has become synonymous with many of their abstracted landscapes. Nichola, known more commonly as Nicky, spent much of her life in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, where she grew up and went on to graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Natal in 1988. She dedicated her short life to a career as a full-time artist until her recent death in 2017. To a certain extent, this work reflects an artistic tradition passed on through the generations that form the Everard Group, with an emphasis on planes of colour visible in Leigh’s work and a rendering of the landscape in a deeply atmospheric and dreamy manner. This current lot titled Malolotja Rocks (Swaziland), Sunset shows the artist’s gestural use of colour to create shape. Her flamboyant palette lending itself well to the depiction of the stark African light, which is clearly bouncing off these voluptuous Malolotja Rocks – a particular subject matter appreciated by both Leigh’s mother and great grandmother, Bertha Everard. 

• 

• 

Larry scully, Blue Abstract

Another interesting work on the sale is lot 75 by Larry Scully. Born in Gibraltar in 1922 to a British father and South African mother, the family immigrated to South Africa when he was sixteen. After serving in the SA Armed Forces from 1939-46, Scully decided to enrol in a Fine Arts Degree at the University of Witwatersrand where he studied alongside many prominent artists such as Cecil Skotnes, Gordon Vorster and Christo Coetzee. He went on to complete a MA focusing on the influences of San art on the work of Walter Battiss. For many years after his graduation, Scully taught art at Pretoria Boys’ High School and it was not until the artist was well into his forties that he held his first solo exhibition and dedicated more of his time to painting. He became Professor of Fine Arts at Stellenbosch University and a trustee of the South African National Gallery until 1984. He painted continuously until his passing in 2002. His work is charged with emotion, with an almost abstract-expressionist interpretation of paint to render spaciousness, with an emphasis on colour and with the use of distinctive brushstrokes, both sweeping and applied. Esmé Berman, who knew the artist well, described his early “preference for the use of primary colours such as occur in African beadwork. He placed particular emphasis on blue and red, with frequent notes of black, which seemed to symbolize for him the more inscrutable properties of African experience – as blue suggested space, and red stood for action and emotion.” 

Jan Volschenk

Lot 97 titled Evening: George Town, Cape Province is an interesting work by the so-called “father of South African painting”, Jan Volschenk, who in many ways was the first local artist to break away from an artistic tradition of painting African landscapes in an inherited 19th-century British style. The self-taught artist was born in 1853 on a farm in the valley of the Langeberg Mountains, where he dedicated his leisure time to painting the rugged landscapes surrounding him. He had been isolated from artistic circles and influences during much of his life and it was not until he was able to travel to Europe with his employer’s family in 1893 that he encountered other artistic traditions. From the age of 51, Volschenk finally dedicated his fulltime attention to painting until his death in 1936. This small romantic work dates to 1914 and although it does not have the more developed technical expertise of his later landscapes, it is characteristic of Volschenk’s deep love for depicting the golden light of sunrise and sunset in the Cape. Less grandiose than some of his larger works, this charming oil painting captures his “romantically descriptive style” with peach-coloured clouds and pink tufts of grass in the foreground.