Lot 171: Joachim Schönfeldt SOUTH AFRICAN 1958- - Roedean School Blossoms in Situ, Plein Air, Summer 2018/9, Johannesburg

Joachim Schönfeldt
SOUTH AFRICAN 1958-
Roedean School Blossoms in Situ, Plein Air, Summer 2018/9, Johannesburg
inscribed with the artist's name, the date and the title on the reverse
oil and varnish on hand-made Oregon pine/meranti wood panel
height: 71,5cm

Painted in the garden of Roedean School, Johannesburg, in the summer of 2018/2019, on site, in situ, plein air.
The proceeds from the sale of this lot will benefit the Roedean School Bursary Fund.
This panel, with five flowers from the beautiful gardens of Roedean School for Girls in Johannesburg, is part of Sché¶nfeldt’s larger body of work,
Documentary Stills , in which he draws up an inventory and creates a sense of order and a system of identification and interpretation. In each of
Joachim Sché¶nfeldt’s painted panels, an interlacing wooden strip coils infinitively around upon itself, enclosing five convex, circular shields on
which five different vignettes are painted. In the present Lot, the artist has painted five different flowers from the school’s gardens, tended for
over 35 years by the indefatigable garden expert Anne Lorentz. Included are the noble but alien rose, and the humble indigenous mallow. The
flowers reference the diversity, youth and promise of the girls who attend the school, as well as the natural rhythms of life and society beyond
the campus.
Sché¶nfeldt painted the flowers from life, en plein air, that is, out of the studio, following a practice pioneered by the Barbizon school of painters
in nineteenth-century France, and made possible by the invention of paint tubes by Windsor & Newton in 1841, and the portable easel, first
displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

Day Sale