Title: Woman reading at a table
Medium: Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1957
Unframed: 44.8cm x 65.2cm
From the early 50s to late 60s Welz became more expressive, and his palette heightened. He purposefully used the ambiguity of line and shape in his paintings so that unexpected shapes would emerge from the canvas. This created a tension between what is foreground and what is background (Miles 1997:9).
The painting technique used in, Women reading at a table, is very inherent to Welz’s artistic vision. Because of a shortage of oil paint, he was forced to work with pastels. For Welz this was the best medium to translate the dry arid landscape of the Karoo into. He wanted to capture the glaring sunlight and bleached out colours and developed a particular method where he layered and fused powdery pastel colours. Later he also transferred this technique into oil paint (Miles 1997:8).
