Cecil Skotnes

His father, Edwin Andor Eilertsen Skotnes was Norwegian, born in Ankenes in 1888.

As a young man, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor, and travelled to Canada where he met Cecil's mother Florence Kendall who was serving in the Salvation Army.

They married and began a life as missionaries in Africa, first along the east coast and later settling in South Africa.

Cecil was their fourth child.

He remembers drawing as a young boy, and being commended at school for his talent and creativity.

He also remembers the freedom of playing in the streets and countryside, of taking a donkey to the rivers on the outskirts of Johannesburg, of fishing and exploring the old artesian wells and stone ruins of iron-age settlements.

He remembers this highveld landscape as a rough place inscribed and abstracted with traces of the past.

He recalls the quality of light and space and the hot African sun – a place that was to make a powerful impression on the development of his creative style.

Cecil Skotnes (1 June 1926 – 4 April 2009) was a prominent South African artist.

He was born in East London in 1926, studied drawing in Florence, Italy, the Witwatersrand Technical Art School and then the University of the Witwatersrand.

Cecil Skotnes was born in 1926 in East London, South African.

After finishing school, Cecil worked for some months in a draughtsman's office, leaving this in 1944 to join the South African forces in Europe.

He fought in Egypt and in Italy, and there again, the landscape of the desert and of the Apennines with their decimated buildings on the top of hills and the ruins of bombardment was to contribute to his developing sensitivity to light and space and place.

At the end of the war, Cecil spent time in Florence, drawn to the place in a way that made it almost impossible for him to return home.

Here he saw the work of Masaccio, Giotto and Donatello – artists whose work was to become a major inspiration to him.

Europe was, however, starkly contrasting to Africa.

Colour and shape was different as was the experience of time and place.

In Europe history is, in one sense, constantly on display; in South Africa, much is hidden beneath the surface.

In Europe there is a sense of human closeness, even claustrophobia; in South Africa space is almost endless.

He was fascinated by this closeness, by the rich heritage of Greek mythology and Greek and Roman architecture and art.

He was nourished by the space, its harshness and its sense of wild mystery.

After returning to Johannesburg, Cecil Skotnes studied at the University of the Witwatersrand completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1950.

He was a member of the Wits Group, that included Christo Coetzee, Larry Scully and Cecily Sash.

He met Thelma Carter at that time, they were married in 1951, and he returned with her to Europe where they stayed for nine months.

Again, Europe was to have a profound influence on him through the experience of the Egyptian, Assyrian and pre-classical Greek art that he saw in places such as the British Museum.

It was, however, the colonial collections from Africa that were to have the greater impact.

Cecil may well have stayed in Europe were it not for this, but instead he was drawn back to Africa, and like his father many years before him he made South Africa his permanent home.

Initially Skotnes painted but was soon encouraged by a friend, the master goldsmith and art collector Egon Guenther to try woodcutting.

It proved to be a perfect medium for him.

His early woodcuts were of landscapes, influenced by the work of Willie Baumeister and Rudolph Sharpf, but his contrasting experiences of the European and the African landscape drove him to try to develop a genre and a style that was uniquely South African.

This challenge was not only iconographical, it was formal too, and the medium of woodcutting offered Cecil the possibility of finding new form for the symbolism he increasingly began to attach to a particularly local vision.

Though Cecil was later to return to painting, woodcutting and engraving has been an enduringly loved medium.

In later years he used it less for land and figure-scapes than as a medium for narrative, and it was in colour woodcut that he produced ground-breaking portfolios of image and text around the themes of neglected South African histories.

Cecil's early use of the medium of woodcutting soon translated into a focus on the block itself.

Instead of cutting the block and then using it as a means to an end – the print – he began to colour and shape the blocks, using them as a surface for paint and dry pigment.

He was appointed cultural officer in charge of the influential Polly Street Art Centre in 1952.

Skotnes was a founding member of the Amadlozi Group in 1961.

In 1979 he moved to Cape Town, where he lived until his death.

In 2003 he was awarded the Order of the Ikhamanga (Gold) by the South African government for his contribution to South African art.

He died on 4 April 2009 at the age of 82.