Works show African heritage
AN INTERESTING painting by Walter Battiss, Five People in a Cave, will be one of attractions at Strauss & Co auction to be held at the Vineyard Hotel, Newlands on Monday.
An important part of the art of Walter Battiss is a confluence of specific African and western pictorial traditions, says Bina Genovese of Strauss.
The western bequest was passed on to him by local art institutions modelled on European establishments. His African heritage is the bounty of his own research, so writes literary, arts and cultural theorist, Prof Andries Oliphant.
Battiss acknowledged that his first exposure to rock art in Koffiefontein in the Free State was to shape the content of his “creative subconscious” for the rest of his life.
He progressed on to in-depth studies of local and international rock art, acknowledged it as a sophisticated art form and published extensively on the subject.
After one of his field trips Battiss wrote: “When I came down from the mountains of initiation I was articulate and free. For I had conversed with the white rocks and lilac trees, the coucal and the rhebuck. I had conversed too with the ancient men of Africa who spoke to me through their picture writings on the walls of their crumbling rock shelters. All this was my peculiar discovery but I had no desire to paint an anecdote about them but rather to make pictures of them in such a way I exposed the happy change they had worked in me.”