St John's College

Not many kilometres away, but a million miles in other respects from the graffiti, vendors, noise and smells of Newtown, are the hallowed grounds of St John's College, a prestigious private school where three of us went sketching on Saturday. With historic stone Herbert Baker buildings arranged around immaculate gardens and sports fields, every direction we looked held another perfect scene waiting for our attention. In fact - apart from having a quick look at the north side, where the wind was blowing and school buildings far too imposing and intimidating to draw - I didn't stir from my first chosen spot in the shade (on a steaming hot Spring day) in the David Quad, just turning to face front, left and up!

I took ink, dip pens and an array of sharpened sticks, determined to try and sketch in the medium of Kiah Kiean, whose work about brings tears to my eyes it's so beautiful. Of course mine is nothing like it, as it should (or shouldn't) be, but I enjoyed the different lines and unexpected results, in spite of my attempts to control them. An organist practising in the chapel nearby, over and over and OVER again was the only slightly jarring note after an hour or two, but I took it as a lesson - practice practice practice!

Street Tales

Sketches from last Friday's trip into Newtown - I decided I had to have a good go at sketching some of the buildings and architecture - something I'm not at all confident or comfortable doing as some of you know! After much holding up of pencils to measure and estimate angles I was quite pleased to get a reasonable rendition of Gwigwi Mwrebi St down, but want to get a looser and more interesting look to my lines - much more practice needed. I left off all the graffiti as my lines might have disappeared in the confusion!                                                             When a big truck parked in front of my view, I turned to the two women selling cigarettes on my right who had been chattering non-stop from the time I sat down next to them. They didn't seem to notice, or care, that I was drawing them. I liked the way the graffiti on the highway pillar soared up behind and above them, kind of illustrating the tales they might have been telling - I needed a longer page!

Newtown Fridays

 

 This is a whole bunch of sketches I've been doing on the first Friday of each month, over the last four months. Our Joburg Sketchers group, of varying attendance, have been meeting with some artists from Assemblage at their studios in Newtown on the west side of the city. We join forces for sketching trips to draw some of the nittier, grittier areas of Johannesburg that we have hesitated to venture to before  -though now and then we have been so brave, for the New Year Carnival and one or two other occasions.

The studios are nearby the underside of the big M1 highway, and so far we haven't managed to go further afield than that as there has been so much happening around there. A new shopping precinct, Newtown Junction, being built; vendors cooking, selling and flirting with the construction workers; a music video being filmed with dancers and a young cyclist flying past - luckily over and over so I had a chance to sketch another bit of him as he sped past. (I switched to a new Moleskine A4 sketchbook half way through this series, hence the buff coloured paper!)

 We're going again tomorrow - hopefully we'll get a bit further along on this long, slow sketch crawl!