Strauss & co - 1 June 2015, Johannesburg

181 253 Cecil Edwin Frans SKOTNES south african 1926–2009 Abstract Heads, triptych one signed carved, incised and painted wood, over three panels 122 by 121 cm each; 121 by 363 cm altogether (3) R800 000 – R1 200 000 Skotnes first started using engraved wood panels as a medium in their own right in 1955. Prior to this they were used only in service of the production of multiples where the engraved wood block would be used as the transfer surface. This new medium – ‘neither painting nor graphic in the strictest sense, nor yet sculpture’– was a direct result of his print-making background and heralded, in South Africa, the discovery of a new medium for display. Says Esmé Berman: ‘He was quick to recognise that the extensive technical variations, which he had employed in order to enliven his black-and-white woodcut prints, were more than adequately compensated for by the physical texture, the natural grain and the colour of the wood itself’. 1 As the engraved panels developed, Skotnes felt they needed an added element of colour to further separate them from their previous designation (the majority of his prints were monochromatic), and to define them as a medium in their own right. He subsequently devised a sensitive technique of rubbing marble dust and powdered oxides into the surface of the panel to avoid jeopardising the texture of the wood. Previously, he had limited his palette to white and earth tones and only around 1967/8 do we see the introduction of stronger tones, reds and chromes. By the time the present example was produced, he had moved further still from his origins in the print-making mediums. Not only is there the presence of graded tones in what would previously have been flat colour plains (as in the shoulder areas of the central couple), but his ‘debt to graphic procedures has been wiped out of his style’. 2 1 Esmé Berman. (1975) The Story of South African Painting , Cape Town and Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema. Page 220–1. 2 Ibid. Page 224. ©The Estate of Cecil Skotnes | DALRO