Life Force - The Still LIfes of Irma Stern

13 Madeira – partly from all over the place – but not so much from where as how it is done.’ 3 In another revealing comment from 1945, she indicated that her paintings had become more ‘abstract of curious values. Maybe not noticeable to the layman. But one day soon it will bring me the same freedom in form and composition – as I have gained in colour’. 4 In most of her still life paintings, Stern’s studied but luscious attention to the luxurious colours and forms of fruits and flowers is balanced against carpets, raffia mats, bowls, vases, martabans and masks, all carefully selected to heighten the sense of vibrant excess that became increasingly characteristic of her work in the course of the 1940s. A reminder of her passionate life as a collector and her insatiable love of travelling, they anchor her compositions in the present while at the same time evoking distant destinations and other times and places. 1 24 March 1942. Spelling corrected for ease of reading. For an accurate transcript of the original letter, see Sandra Klopper, 2017, Irma Stern. Are you still alive? Stern’s life and art seen through her letters to Richard and Freda Feldman, 1934–1966. Cape Town: Orisha Publishing, 103. 2 Norman Bryson, 1990, Looking at the overlooked. Four essays on still life painting. Reaktion Books, 34 . 3 See Klopper, 177. 4 See Klopper, 128.