Notes

Cecil Skotnes’ figurative landscape paintings made on wood panels in the late 1990s were most often entirely painted rather than painted and engraved. The figures fill the picture plane and stand nestled into the earth below a high horizon line. They are crowded, but also isolated: a variegated umber form insulated in a white cocoon, or a vermilion figure set apart by a blue hollow that mimics the sky. They appear as ancestral, entombed, a community shaped by the very pigments that comprise the earth that inters them. Colour was as much the subject matter of Skotnes’ work as the narrative or emblematic themes that preoccupied him. His studio shelves were packed with jars, bottles and boxes of pigments that he would blend into his paints to enrich the colour and give an earthy texture. He was drawn to the fields of cinnabar that formed the backgrounds of Roman wall paintings and intrigued by its traces in early Cycladic sculpture. He drew on a range of ochres that came from the same sources as those ground into paint with fat and egg to make the Magdalenian rock paintings of the Dordogne and the striding figures of Brandberg in Namibia. He mixed these pigments to create gradations of colour or dabbed them onto the surface of a wet undercoat to create texture and volume. His favoured colours included a rich crimson, comprising haematite and iron oxide and yellow ochres sometimes mixed with manganese oxide to produce the darker shades of sienna or umber. The variations in scale in these painted panels, the ghostly figures, the suggestion of plant and trunk of tree suggest human transformations mirrored by the alteration of earth and rock into colour and form.

—Pippa Skotnes, 2022.

Provenance

Property of a Collector.