Notes

Cecil Skotnes studied painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the still life genre formed an essential component of the newly founded art school's parochial curriculum.¹ His first professional exhibition in 1955, at Whippman's Gallery, Johannesburg, included still life scenes. Although best known for his graphics and abstracted figural studies on incised wood panels, Skotnes did not shun still life. In 1977 he produced The Origin of Wine, a three-panel scene for the Cape Wine Growers Association (KWV) that includes a still life with fruit, fish, bottles and glasses in the left panel. "The triptych unashamedly divulges the artist's epicurean gastronomic pleasures," noted Frieda Harmsen.² Skotnes credited art collector and dealer Vittorio Meneghelli with introducing him to the pleasures of food and wine. He amassed a wine collection of 1800 bottles at his home in Observatory, Johannesburg.

Skotnes returned to painting after his move to Cape Town in 1979. He painted a number of still life scenes. The present lot shares notable similarities with Still Life with Fruit, Olives, Wine Bottle and Coffee Pot, a work gifted by the artist to a chef and sold for R909 440 at a Strauss & Co auction in 2013. Both works offer table settings viewed from extreme vertical perspectives. Any sense of naturalism is disrupted by the flattened picture plane and the painter's classificatory arrangement of food and objects, which are interchangeably portrayed in side and top profile. This lot is larger in scale than the other work, and additionally features a shelf-like display of stoneware, each object clearly delineated (as if refuting Morandi's habit of clustering objects). Despite its unusual spatial distortions, this is fundamentally a work of pleasure: a painter's delight in his medium as much as the bounty his painting describes.

1. Frieda Harmsen. (1996) 'Artist Resolute', in Cecil Skotnes. Cape Town: Cecil Skotnes, page28.
2. Ibid., page 45.
3. James Ambrose Brown. (1984) 'Interview with Cecil Skotnes', 20 April, Cape Town, uncorrected typed transcript, page19. Available at http://cecilskotnes.com