Extensive Landscape ,1967
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Note : In 1966 Erik Laubscher was the first South African artist to receive the Carnegie Grant, allowing him to spend three months on a tour of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Washington, studying art movements in the USA. One of the developments that followed from this study trip was the “substantiation of the ‘hard-edge’ tendencies of his style with an accompanying elimination of all texture” (Berman 1983:251). Another was the use of acrylic, paint that dries faster and creates the impression of movement in the texture of the paint surface (Gray 1978:108). These developments suited Laubscher’s intention to establish movement, volume, perspective by means of colour, and tension created by contrasting elements as the dominant features of his work.
Extensive Landscape, painted in acrylic the year after his return from the USA, is a celebration of all these features. The landscape is rendered in four nuanced colour fields, flowing across the canvas without any form of vegetation or human presence to determine scale. The sheer volume of the Western Cape landscape is unlike any other, Laubscher remarked in an interview in 1967: “There is a heroic majesty about everything pertaining to Africa…. The artist must have a definite oneness with this magnitude” (Gray 1978:108). Instead of being a mere cerebral exercise, this abstraction is indicative of Laubscher’s intimate relationship with nature.
Johan Myburg
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