Cape Town Harbour 1958

Gregoire Boonzaier painted this little scene of Cape Town Harbour with oil on canvas and a kind of off-hand attention to detail. Look at how the forms emerge from these careful, almost rectangular, blocks of colour. It’s interesting, isn't it, the way Boonzaier uses these muted blues and greys to describe the scene? It feels like he's really thinking through his brush, each stroke building up the texture and structure of the harbor, as if the physical act of painting is a way of understanding the world. The paint isn’t too thick, but you can still feel the presence of the brush, especially in the choppy water. There’s a particular mark I love, that little dab of red in the boat. It's like a tiny heartbeat in the middle of all that blue and grey. Thinking about his contemporary, Wolf Kibel, I'm struck by a similarity in their commitment to colour as a means of structural expression. Both of them suggest how art is a language, constantly evolving, always open to interpretation.