I ♥ Olivia Scholnick Painter

An old woman lies ill in a Cape Town nursing home - but to call her 'old' seems misguided. 

Her spirit is young and her work is as fresh and startling as ever. She dreams of colours and an endless vista, of perfect fruit and the forms of flowers, of blue and gold and the sea and the sky....

A painter, a practical woman, self-deprecating and generous, beautiful still, with long hair piled on her head and amazing piercing eyes,  of Afrikaans birth and Jewish conversion, an intellect, an aesthete, but never pretentious or obscure

Olivia Scholnick or Olive, as we all know her, is one of South Africa's best landscape and still life painters.  This is a celebration of her Life & Art.

Born in 1927, in Williston, Cape Province, after obtaining a teachers diploma, she taught in, the then, Rhodesia - where she met and married David Scholnick - my Dad's very close friend  - before returning to Cape Town in 1963

A trained graphic artistand musician, Olive, studied music in the 60's at the Conservatoire in Stellenbosch and graphics at Cape Town Art Centre under Kevin Atkinson  

 Primarily a painter of landscapes, seascapes, she has worked in acrylic, pastel, conté and pencil always painting attended by her current doggy and her classical music

Olive travelled widely travelled in Africa and abroad and in 1984 stayed at the Mishkenot Artist's residence in Jerusalem and was invited twice to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris

She has been part of the South African art scene with her colourful abstract landscapes and still-lives for nearly fifty years and has had many solo and group exhibitions

Here is our own Ms P in Olive's studio on one of our annual visits there

And here is Olive's beloved dog, Charlie the schnauzer

> Africa newspapers > Africa News Service > November 2002

Olive's 'Homage to a Moonflower' - pastel and charcoal drawings - and 'Landscapes of the Mind' - bright acrylic paintings on canvas were shown at the Irma Stern Museum. She sketched and painted the Moonflower season on canvas and in the garden - wonderfully evocative flowers which like the ultimate memento mori open only a few hours before dying

The title above 'Breakfast at Abahati' is particularly poignant - Olive and my aunt, Cape Town sculptor, Lorraine Edelstein, were dear friends and along with fellow artists and their wives -  Neville and the redoubtable Rhona Dubow and Cecil and Thelma Skotnes, would meet regularly for one of Lorraine's feasts. We remember our many lunches - and breakfasts - on the terrace at Abahati, with its huge view of false Bay, with fond nostalgia

Olive's paintings have become sought after, with works in many public collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, University of Stellenbosch and Rand Merchant Bank

Olive has showed solo at the Strand Street Gallery, Gallery International, Association of Arts Gallery, Belleville Gallery, the Irma Stern Museum - all in Cape Town - as well as the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg and the Jacob & Liknaitzky Gallery in Stellenbosch

And has had Group Exhibitions all over South Africa including the SA National Gallery and AVA  

Her earliest works were beautiful landscapes - here one called the Bokkeveld

Her mix of abstraction and observation draws one into an inner scape.  She magnifies fragments of landscape, turning them into what she describes as "abstracted landscapes of the mind". A distilled vision, filtered through memory and sketches and then painted in her studio

As beautiful as a Derrain, a Matisse or a Gauguin, or Hockney's latest brilliant landscape oeuvre. The works of her last show, 'Metamorphosis of a Landscape' pushed the boundaries between landscape and abstraction - resonant with vibrant colour, pictorial elements reduced to simplified gestures and shapes

  Above quotation from Norman & Heidi Smuts book 'Olivia Scholnick' - see below

                                                                                  And here one of her famous seascapes

And her lovingly tended garden with its arums and ferns

A green paradise off the Wynberg Main Road

In more recent years, Olive has turned to her garden for inspiration

And to a series of beautiful seemingly simple still-life compositions

She has always painted in acrylics impatient with the slow-drying of oils

We loved our visits to Olive's studio, its densely packed canvases which Olive would modestly unpack, the many paintbrushes of every size and shape, the smell of paint and the sun coming in from the little courtyard garden in the Wynberg house David had built her

Everything so beautiful - an artist's house

Simply furnished and filled with books, art, kelims and cushions from India, Turkey or Israel

African artifacts on a window sill, the fig tree and sunlight filtering through

Bright sunflowers or fruit, always coffee or tea and sometimes we would stay for lunch

 One of my favourite pictures of the very beautiful Olive

 And our Hannah P some years ago in Olive's garden

Filled with light and shade, water and stone, exotic blooms and giant tropical plants

Always a very special visit

We would love to have bought every one of her incredible works

Olive, always so elegant at my Mom, Rosemary's welcome back 'soiree' - Muizenberg 2010

You can view or buy Olive's book on Blurb - http://www.blurb.com/books/2263998