As a young man, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor, and travelled to Canada where he met Cecil's mother Florence Kendall who was serving in the Salvation Army.
He also remembers the freedom of playing in the streets and countryside, of taking a donkey to the rivers on the outskirts of Johannesburg, of fishing and exploring the old artesian wells and stone ruins of iron-age settlements.
He recalls the quality of light and space and the hot African sun – a place that was to make a powerful impression on the development of his creative style.
After finishing school, Cecil worked for some months in a draughtsman's office, leaving this in 1944 to join the South African forces in Europe.
He fought in Egypt and in Italy, and there again, the landscape of the desert and of the Apennines with their decimated buildings on the top of hills and the ruins of bombardment was to contribute to his developing sensitivity to light and space and place.
This challenge was not only iconographical, it was formal too, and the medium of woodcutting offered Cecil the possibility of finding new form for the symbolism he increasingly began to attach to a particularly local vision.
In later years he used it less for land and figure-scapes than as a medium for narrative, and it was in colour woodcut that he produced ground-breaking portfolios of image and text around the themes of neglected South African histories.
The Cape is suffused with blues and violets, the light is softer, more influenced by rolling cloud banks that drift in from the north west, and the greys and greens of the sea.
Included in these were the memories of the Brandberg, a great mountain which rises out of the Namib desert and which was the home of aboriginal hunter-gatherers who left their own paintings on its rock surfaces many thousands of years ago.
Cecil wanted to create a place where he could train professionals and give talented young black adults a chance at a career in art.
A local food store donated soup and this, along with the background sounds of jazz from the hall next door, began to attract increasing numbers of students to the centre.
The first significant commission Skotnes secured was for Sydney Kumalo (later to become a well known and highly respected artist) who, along with other Polly Street students and Cecil's help, decorated the Catholic Church of Kroonstad.
By the time the apartheid authorities effectively shut down Polly Street (such a thriving centre could not be tolerated in a "white" area), there was a prosperous community of black artists.
The journey of his father from Norway to Canada and then to Africa, the death of his uncle on the Spitzbergen, the cold dim landscape of the Arctic Circle and its contrast to the heat of the South African highveld, and the damp richness of the Cape coast.
He has produced works on these themes, most notably two portraits of the dead uncle, a trapper who was found, frozen in his hut in the company of the bears, foxes and birds he had hunted.
These pictures hold the memories of the gold death masks of Mycenae, the bronze figures of Delphi, the stained pottery and the carved sticks of the early agriculturalists of eastern Africa.
In their line and gestures, they lament the lives lost, the sacrifice and cruelty and the potential not realised by the miserable system of separate development that held South Africa in its grip for half a century.
Cecil Skotnes's career has been a rich and rewarding one from which many have benefited – his family, his students, young artists, his friends and those who have bought and bartered his work.