Alex Dodd
‘There is nothing pretty here, whether the work is of the 1960s or the 1990s,” writes the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Professor Eric Campbell Fernie. Fernie is writing about the work of South African artist Cecily Sash who this month returned to South Africa after 24 years in England for an exhibition of her recent work.
And Fernie is right: nothing pretty. Rather, as artist and fine art lecturer Karel Nel put it at her opening at the Karen McKerron Gallery, Sash’s work radiates with a “poetic, brusque beauty”.
Sash is an artist known for her formal experimentation and her calculated, cerebral approach to the canvas. Her works have always had a stark, linear quality and, to this day, retain a dryness, a harshness, a sense of absence. Yet, as Nel put it, “the formal elements in her work are deeply underpinned by an emotional power that is sometimes suppressed, sometimes powerfully there”.
In 1974 Sash wrote of her work: “I think that when the human situation is disturbing and when I become terribly distressed, this shows itself in my work. When I see no way out for man at all and feel despair at this total inability to live with himself and others, I produce these rather violent, searingly destructive paintings.”
Sash’s approach to birds, for example, has never been conventional or expected. Whereas birds are generally associated with peace, freedom, gentleness, Sash’s birds have a strange, unsettling effect on the viewer.
To this day they remain stark, angular forms that leave one with a sense of something ancient and primordial – like a dark sense of something brooding left over from a nightmare.
In her recent work, charged with the haunting presence of Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, “animals and insects have transformed themselves and moved into the realm of the numinous”, said Nel. “Sash always uses her observations of nature in a metaphorical sense.”
Born in Delmas in 1924, Sash has made a huge contribution to the development of South African art during her 30 years of working life, both as a teacher and an artist, here in South Africa.
This contribution is examined and celebrated in a book called Cecily Sash: Working Years, launched along with her exhibition at the Karen McKerron. In it Sash writes: “My early work of the Fifties and early Sixties – before I again came to Europe – was very much my personal vision of the way that the Transvaal with its bleakness and the blond grass and strong sunlight was, which bleaches colour out of things.
“People always think that if you get a lot of sunlight you can have a lot of colour, whereas it’s the reverse, it reduces colour. But I think I was painting the Transvaal as it really was. Not through European eyes, as did the Dutch painters and English who came out in the 1800s and early 1900s, who still saw everything the European way. The Transvaal I’m talking about was essentially dry, arid, treeless, spiky, thorned, attenuated – and that was the quality my early work had.”
Things change and Sash has been through many stages and reinventions in her vast artistic career. Her recent works bristle with those fundamental elements: dry, arid, spiky, thorned, attenuated. It might not be “the Transvaal” that she is painting today, but the Transvaal in her has never gone away.
In an essay written in 1990 and included in the book, Professor Elizabeth Rankin of Wits’s history of art department writes: “The confidence that characterises South African art today was bought through the professionalism of artists like Sash, who demonstrated their ability to address the contemporary concerns of international art. Only because she and others like her firmly established modernism in South African art, did the experiments of postmodernism become possible.”
The work of Cecily Sash is on show at the Karen McKerron Gallery until October 20 and thereafter at Cape Town’s Irma Stern Museum from November 2