Elahi was born in Cape Town nearly ninety years ago, and even though she has spent most of her working life in Pretoria, she has never broken her ties with the Mother City. This holiday season, UCT’s Irma Stern Museum celebrates the artist’s lifelong passion for the city, the Cape and the sea with this exhibition of her works.

Growing up in Bishopscourt, Elahi showed her interest in art at an early age. The exhibition includes a linocut of a river near Oudtshoorn, which she made as a 14-year-old. She took up the role of chemist in the Oros factory, but her time completing a science degree at UCT was filled more by organising the art society than anything else, and she jumped at the chance to study art in London after finishing her BSc.

Life took a different turn when she married an Iranian water engineer. The family returned to South Africa in 1957 and settled in Pretoria, where she has lived ever since. With her parents still in Cape Town, the family would migrate there for the summer holiday and her early subjects were mostly of her children playing on the beach. After a hiatus in her career, Elahi flung herself back into working mode when she won the 1968 New Signatures Award, and a solo exhibition followed in 1972.

In the early seventies, Elahi discovered the thrill of the boats preparing for the Cape to Rio yacht race and her work of this era is filled with the colour and bustle of sails and masts. At the time, the city docks were a working area which required a permit to enter, and on the quays of what is now the V&A Waterfront, she sat night after night painting sunsets and howling South Easter gales, painting a series of inks of the Penny Ferry and the tugs going out to tankers, ropes that tied up huge ships, and the cranes that dotted the docks. The reflections of boats in the water also fascinated her, and this era captures historic images not only of the city harbour, but also the fishing harbour in Hout Bay and Simonstown’s naval dockyard.

Some of these works will be on show, having been in the artist’s own collection since they were first exhibited in the seventies, including a large oil of the view of Table Mountain from one of the Union Castle liners, the Pretoria Castle.

Trained to paint in oil, and using watercolour primarily as a notational medium, Elahi soon became a master in using the immediacy of watercolour to capture the changing light and shade as she painted out of doors and her plein air studies at times have seaspray, raindrops or desert sand embedded in them.

Painting along the Cape coastline led to a series exploring Cape mountain passes, and her Red phase was followed by trips to Namibia’s dune fields. Elahi’s never-ending interest in the constantly changing moods of the sea has found an ongoing subject in the shoreline of this barren wilderness on the Skeleton coast and up the Cape’s West Coast. 

Art patron Harrie Siertsema, who owns a large collection of Elahi’s sepia inks of Cape Town Docks, was determined to bring the artist’s work back to her home town, where she last held a show over twenty years ago. Along with Nushin Elahi, one of her daughters, he has curated the exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum that includes a range of works to take the viewer on a journey from the early paintings of storms in Cape Town’s harbour, to seals playing in the foam at Cape Cross, way up Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.

For more information, visit www.aliceelahi.co.za. Alternatively, email [email protected] or [email protected].