Title: Rock art
Medium: Oil on canvas
Signed
Unframed: 59cm x 75cm
Framed: 93cm x 109cm
Also known as “The Bushman Painter”, Walter Battiss became the first South African artist to ever represent rock art from a purely aesthetic point of view through his exhibition of copies of rock paintings exhibited in 1944. Four years later, in 1948, he ventured out into the Namib Desert where he lived among the Bushmen for a time (Borman). The artwork, Rock Art, was part of the 1944 exhibition. Battiss (Standard Bang Gallery 2005:16) summed up the importance of rock art in his inner world as follows: “As a boy William Fowler led me by the hand to the ancient stones and only much later did I realize how my creative subconscious had bee affected by this revelation of early art.”
