South African landscape artist

Alice Elahi established herself as one of South Africa’s leading landscape artists. Her most enduring subject, for over 20 years, was the Namibian landscape – its desert interior and its wild and inaccessible shoreline.

Alice Elahi has said: “The Namib to me is Africa… There is so much in this wonder world of the Namib. My work is really memories of this other Africa, the space, the beauty.“ Alice has painted the plains of the diamond areas of the Sperrgebiet, the pink flats, areas of feldspar rock, plains of quartz crystals the zebra dunes of the Skeleton Coast. With the help of the Nature Conservation she was able to paint in ecologically vulnerable areas to which public access is totally denied.

Other major themes have been seascapes of the Cape coast, the African Bushveld, flower studies and early subjects such as beach studies with figures. She worked in watercolour, mixed media and oils.

The late art critic Johan van Rooyen said (2002): “Elahi may today be considered one of the most accomplished and subtle landscapists in the book of South African art. She expresses most poignantly the temper and temperament of our wilds.”