Elegies to the Slender Scrub - paintings by Helmut Starcke

About a hundred metres from artist Helmut Starcke’s home in the seaside hamlet of Betty’s Bay is the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden. It is cocooned in the heart of the Cape Fynbos region. Fynbos frames Starcke’s house. Seamless fields of scrub – in yellow, lilac, gold and green – snake along the scenic ocean, with around 1 600 plant species, the fynbos appears ubiquitously spread across the region, displaying an enormous floral diversity. It makes sense therefore that fynbos, or ‘slender scrub’ as it is translated, literally, from Dutch, should comprise the principal iconography of Starcke’s current body of works.

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