“On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.”

John O’Donahue (Anam Cara: Book of Celtic Wisdom)

Over time, landscape painting has featured amongst the most prominent subjects in South African art. The country’s unique warm light, fertile farmlands and valleys, ancient peaks and silent deserts have struck chords with artists of all disciplines, and inspired one of our greatest legacies; a distinctively South African visual language.

To paint a landscape is to capture something of the ephemeral, a timelessness of scenes that have been and will remain long after we have gone. The artists capture a kind of transient state, of in-between places and locations that stir passionate emotions of a bygone time, place and space. And for all who gaze upon them such pictures share a certain nostalgia and remembrance of a place under the spreading boughs of a tree, which confirms our affinity to the natural and our propensity to an open sky.

South African landscapes open the doors and windows of one’s inner soul to the freshness of the Drakensbergs mountain streams, lush forest greens and the ever reaching skies over the endless Karoo. It is the light that reflects off of the clouds and the intricate foregrounds that evokes memories of our sublime country and its iconic views. The act of painting itself projects a light from within and this transference onto canvas is an essential if unstated aspect of landscape painting; of standing between two realities simultaneously, and at that moment, anything is possible. It is when you are at these interstices that one is most aware of one’s self. It is the space between starting and ending.

The phrase ‘how you see is who you are’ attractively ties the experience of landscape to personal identity. Yet our connection to landscape is also a mirror of our relationships with each other. As politics, technology and media suffuse our lives, can landscape painting still offer a way of extending our sense of ourselves?

In Scats Esterhuyse’s current collection of works, one cannot help but be drawn into feelings the landscape provokes in us, which surface unpredictably and in spite of ourselves, much like a sudden involuntary love that one feels for another person. Scats discovers within each of his paintings a memory of Eden through complex layers of self reflection and epitomises this by his concise crispness in the condensation of moments captured on canvas, of a rite of passage through time and space. His love of landscape and a transmission of that love into landscape painting unites our senses in seeing, feeling and thinking.

Bell Hooks: “It’s interesting – the way in which one has to balance life – because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back...There’s always some luminal space in between.

PROCEEDS TO CHARITY

From the new collection of landscape paintings by Scats Esterhuyse, Graham's Fine Art Gallery will be auctioning one painting: 'Backs to the Wind: Muizenberg' on the exhibitions opening night, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Kidney Beanz Trust, a foundation that provides support to children with severe kidney disease.
http://www.kidneybeanz.co.za