Visionary Artists, Parallel Lives -Gladys Mgudlandlu

19 Recalling her time in Europe [Maggie Laubser] commented: ‘Sometimes my friends in Europe asked me if I didn’t miss the South African sun and every time my answer was no – no, not the South African sun but the spaces of the South African landscape. This love of space gives me a free and abandoned feeling. It gives me my vision and therefore in my work I can never be bound to the restriction of photographic impressions’. When Laubser returned to South Africa permanently in 1924, her conceptual orientation was established. Concerned with the act of painting, interested in the capacity of the landscape to convey spiritual beliefs, and convinced that the artist possessed creative freedom, Laubser produced designs based on natural motifs. Landscapes function as vehicles as well as arrangements of decorative elements and as contexts for dark figures. Placed to occupy pictorial rather that logical, physical space, the figures identify the landscape and provide local content. Laubser saw the local South African labouring class in a highly idealised and reductive way. People – women bearing loads of washing or wood, and men harvesting fields – are pretexts for the expression of a religious world-view that did not engage with social realities, but understood existence as the harmonious exchange of energy between nature and humankind. Laubser sustains this optimism with a palette that emphasizes optical and symbolic, rather than social, meaning in her work. Marion Arnold (1996) Women and Art in South Africa , Johannesburg: David Philip, pages 59 and 60.