Losing her heart to the Namibian landscape, particularly the desert and the sea, both almost unnaturally yet breathtakingly beautiful, has dominated most of the latter part of Alice Elahi’s life as a painter.
For almost 50 years she has recorded the African landscape with extraordinary precision and in colours that capture the wildness and exquisite spectacle of this continent.
What makes it so remarkable is that most of the watercolours were made in situ, sometimes at breakneck speed as she was in a particular space courtesy of a particular conservationist or ranger who only had so much time. But usually when she sat down, she had studied the particular subject for weeks and knew exactly what she was going to do.
Before her endless travels to Namibia, leaving her husband behind in Pretoria to fend for their four daughters, she was often in the South African veld across the country, but usually a bit closer to home, that’s why her most recent retrospective in 1995 was titled Cape to Cunene. About especially the Namibian treks she says : “ The young men in these remote places must have thought I was batty.” But no one who stands surrounded by her work could ever think that. She went where few people went, up gulleys, walking in peasoup-thick fog which was like disappearing into a vacuum, but it was exactly that blankness, the empty nothingness of the Namibian landscape that held her painterly eye in a gridlock. “I had so much fun,” she says of all her escapades, but also pays homage to her long-suffering family.
Her expeditions were often determined by the length of time her food and water lasted and when she set off to some of these remote areas on her own, she would have to leave markers for her minders so that they would know which way she went if she didn’t return.
Yet nothing fazed this determined artist. She was always very private about her painting and these conditions suited her style while similarly presenting the kind of landscape that spoke to her soul. “I loved interpreting the desert and the sea,” she explains. She found safety in the remoteness because there were no creative distractions.
“I didn’t need anything else but the desert for kicks,” is how she describes her passion. While she was out in the heat of the African sun with no one around, it was only her and the paintbrush that did the communicating.
“I tuned into the landscape,” she says.
Daughter Nushin Elahi believes because of her mother’s specific style, she has trained many viewers how to look at paintings.
Elahi snr was born more than 80 years ago, but settled in Pretoria with her Iranian husband and children in 1958. Trained as a painter in London with a Polish artist, Ruszkowski, she seriously returned to art in 1968 when she was one of the winners of the Sanlam New Signatures Award which is still giving young artists similar opportunities today.
It is her longevity too that is so remarkable. Talking about painting today, she says she hasn’t been doing much lately, but she’s really pointing to the fact that she has been occupied with this exhibition which Nushin is curating.
“It’s a tough ask,” says this fine arts journalist about selecting specific paintings for the retrospective of her mother’s work. “I went back and looked at how others had done it before me,” she says.
In recent years, her mom has been exhibiting at home because she has that kind of old-fashioned house which can transform itself into a gallery. But also, following the death of her youngest daughter, she turned her back on the commercial art world which meant that she could take control of her own destiny. Her work speaks for itself.
She was an active member of the Pretoria Art Museum’s Friends committee for many years and is also a long-standing member of the South African Arts Association.
l Alice Elahi – Landscape through an Artist’s Eyes, a Retrospective. April 26, North Gallery, Art Museum, cnr Baard (Schoeman) and Wessels Sts, Arcadia Park.