Notes

‘I attempted to create the silences …The battle site was Isandhlwana in Natal, but it could have been any monument to man's folly. After all, I have strode over battlefields when the smoke was still all-embracing and the roar of guns was still in my ears [Skotnes served in the South African Artillery in Egypt and Italy during WWI] … After great noise the silence is almost unbearable – it is the mind and spirit summing up the causes of the cataclysm, and those who pause to understand usually never survive. They are the spirits of reason, and our times, while taking cognisance of reasons, never indulge in reason. The creative souls can and usually do quickly sense the times and are usually first to set down their reactions. Also, at the moment of conception there is no fear. Those figures on the battle site are not the ghosts of dead men – they are the understanding of what is to occur or the wilderness created by storm … The silence of the battle site lets the spirits live again.’¹

1. Skotnes, as quoted in Harmsen (1996), page 37.

Provenance

Bonhams, London, 24 March 2010, lot 99.

Literature

cf. Frieda Harmsen (1996) Cecil Skotnes, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: South African National Gallery, other works from the series illustrated.