Notes

Throughout his life Walter Battiss continued to paint in his favourite medium, watercolour, and he demonstrated a remarkable understanding of the medium and its subtleties. His watercolours originate in a conservative tradition, initially the recording of rock art and an engagement with landscape painting, the latter which he explored in his first years as a teacher at Pretoria Boys’ High School in the 1930s. The dry, hot landscape that he at first shied away from was later to be masterfully captured in a bold manner with the use of an adventurous colour palette.

The importance and influence of both landscape and rock art prevails throughout his career. The landscape becomes part of a fresh and intuitive way of engaging with nature and the numerous places, particularly the islands, that he visited in the course of his life. His landscapes are not topographical paintings but images that become diaries of his travels, diaries of place that form a kind of shorthand, a visual travelogue, and often culminate in both sketchy and highly developed works such as Seagulls (lot 16, May 2022 Online).

Bathers (lot 19) and Farewell my Son (lot 20) show the strong influence of rock art reinterpreted in a highly stylised manner – but there is a playfulness that goes far beyond the tradition of rock art recording and documenting. His very early watercolour African Daisies (lot 25) and the later Composition with Seaweed (lot 17) also illustrate how acutely Battiss was aware of plant forms and how intently he observed the natural.

Two Figures (lot 21) is an example of his uncanny ability to transform observations into stylised, sometimes even child-like representations. In this instance he paints two figures sitting on a birdlike floating tree branch wafting through washes of pinks, apricots, blues and violet. Artist Karel Nel comments, ‘this is almost an anti-landscape painting, an internalised fantastical landscape of the mind.’

Battiss’s invention of Fook Island stemmed from his intense fascination with the Greek, Indian Ocean and Polynesian islands he visited. He developed postage stamps, passports, birds and animals for the mythical realm. The fantastical calligraphic lexicon, Fook Alphabet, developed from his deep interest in rock art and the visual language and alphabet-like forms of rock engravings. The two delightful watercolours in lot 18 relate to this project.

Provenance

Estate Walter Battiss.