Artwork Description
From the slopes above Cape Town, "Botanical Divide" looks across a tangle of flowering vegetation towards the city and harbour below. Karen Wykerd gives much of the canvas over to the plants themselves, their white blooms and lively greens almost obscuring the urban landscape beyond.
There is something particularly Cape Town about this view: wild growth in the foreground, roads and buildings threading through the middle distance, and Table Bay stretching quietly towards the horizon. Wykerd doesn’t tidy the landscape up. Instead, her loose, layered brushwork allows the vegetation to jostle for space, while the city is picked out in smaller, more restrained marks.
The divide suggested by the title is there, but so is the connection. Botanical Divide brings Cape Town’s natural and built landscapes into the same view, with the mountain vegetation firmly holding its ground.
Botanical Divide is an original acrylic painting on canvas measuring 62 × 75 cm unframed, available for R19,000.
