A Little Break

I'm posting this very rough, quick sketch I did on a cold, wet, windy beach over the Easter weekend - just to say I'm still here, or at least I'm back. We went down to the Cape for a break with friends in their beach cottage, where we mostly slept, read, talked, ate and drank some lovely champagne. All in all a wonderful restful week in which I refused to feel guilty for not being more productive, a goal in which the appalling weather co-operated greatly! After that we went to Cape Town for the other purpose of our journey - a big 40 year reunion of our school matric class, which turned out to be a completely happy experience renewing old friendships and making some new ones.
Lots to do and catch up on now that we're back - I hope it's not too long before I have something to show you again here!

Fisherman's cottage

This is one of the fisherman's cottages at Arniston, where we holidayed - this old section is called Kassies Baai - and the whole place is a national monument, dating back 200 years, which for South Africa is a long history - I know it won't impress some of you ancients with 700+ year old architecture, but we are very proud of these humble little abodes! They look charmingly hand-crafted - uneven walls, rounded edges and softly moulded edifices. The people living there have inevitably embraced the modern world - electric power lines, cars, trailers and caravans now embellish the simple time-worn village - but the feeling lingers on...
I zoned in on the cottage above, trying to define the shapes of the white-washed walls with subtle variations of colour (which aren't so subtle after all) - a painting I've been thinking of doing for ages - it's a start, but I need to try it again... and again... (on Canson Not 24 x 32 cm)
The little sketch on the right isn't finished, but it gives an impression of what the light is like there on a sunny day - glaringly bright, the whites of buildings and sand melding into each other, and everything sun-bleached and washed out.

Now listen, here's something exciting! I've been invited to be a correspondent on the Urban Sketchers blog!! I feel very honoured to be joining the amazing sketchers there from all over the world - and to be another of the rather scarce dots on the map of Africa. I'm going to have to get out more to keep the urban sketches flowing, but that's a good thing - I've been rather house-bound of late. My introduction will be on the 1st of February, I think, so come and visit there, wont you?

Watching TV

I am having trouble getting going in this new year - recovering now from watching the wondrous events in Washington into the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Congratulations

America on your exciting and inspiring new president - we, and most of South Africa I'm sure, were enthralled at the event, the crowds, the jubilation (reminding us of our own historic elections in 1994) and the message of honesty, fair play and hard work. I hope that Africa's despots were watching, and quaking in their ill-gotten palaces at these words:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West -- know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.

Amen!

Right! Back to the watercolours - this is another rainy-day painting I did of my son's friend Julian while on holiday. The likeness is quite good - he has the most startlingly blue eyes, dark lashes, full curling lips and rosy cheeks, but I've made him look more sulky than he does really. Also I made my old mistake of trying to squeeze his long legs onto my small page - I did a digital adjustment here on the right making the legs bigger, looking more foreshortened and it helps to make him look more relaxed in the chair. I need to get back to some figure drawing classes!

What's going on?!...fixed!!

***Well this is weird... no matter what I do, this image loads vertically instead of horizontally, as it always was in the process of painting, photographing and editing it! I didn't rotate it in my editing programme originally... I tried rotating it at 90 deg and saving it again so that it might upload the right way, but nope... before I write any more about it, does anyone have a clue what's happened - is it the nasty phisherman that I clicked on in my comments a while back? Is it Blogger? Help! (I have reported it to Blogger - hope they fix it)

***Oh Voila, frabjous day... I fixed it - made a new jpg from a previously saved Tif file, and it's righted itself. Don't ask me why but it has.

... Cola belongs to our good kind and generous friends who welcomed us warmly and shared their lovely holiday home with us - a little cross-foxie SPCA special, she was so picturesque curled up on the green and aqua-blue throws that during some of the rainy/windy/coolish hours, I kept my paints at the ready for when she struck this pose in various spots around the lounge. It was never long before she found something else to be off doing, so this watercolour (Fabriano accordion sketchbook - 180 x 250 mm) was done over quite a few days. Cola has a 'big brother' Pepsi, a most beautiful German Shepherd cross-goodness-knows, who I would also like to have painted, but when he isn't bounding around the coastline, he collapses in very hairy heaps behind the sofas, looking more like a huge furry rug than a dog. I think a photo reference for him will be necessary. I left this one with Judi and Russ as a very small token of thanks - think I owe them a biggie!

Last sea sketches

The last of my sea sketches - that's a seagull sitting on top of the beacon, which the kids swim out to as a rite of passage into bragging rights beach-champ status. I hope to do a proper painting or two at some stage from them when my studio is sorted - I wish I'd done that for the start of the new year so I could get started while full of enthusiasm and energy from the break.

We once stayed in that house on the cliff for a long weekend - it's called 'Listen to the Ocean', and of course that song runs endlessly through my head whenever I see it - fantastic views up and down the coastline, and back towards Kassies Baai village, a national monument with it's famous 200 year old white fisherman's cottages, painted countless hundreds of times by artists over the years. I felt too voyeurish to sit there and sketch people's homes but I took a few photos from a distance and may paint from those too.

Listen to the ocean,

echoes of a million seashells

Forever it's in motion

Moving to a rhythmic and unwritten music

That's played eternally

Oh I do like to be beside...

This whole vacation I was struck by the many striations (striata?) of every vista - sea, land and sky - almost like handwriting across the landscape. There were lots of clouds all the time, probably causing the horizontal bands and streaks on every surface.

More pages from my moleskine notebook... while I'm posting these holiday sketches I'm trying to get my house, and after that my studio, in order so I can get back to 'work' (though I can't think of it as work :o). My daughters took turns to house- and pet-sit while we were away and if I tell you that I first had to clean the vacuum cleaner before I could vacuum, wash the mop before I could mop, and rinse out the washing machine and dishwasher before... well you get an idea of what a mess we are in! The studio has become a bit of a general dumping ground, I'm going to have to assert myself there again - and then I might get to making plans for the New Year - by which time it'll probably be February!

Seaside studies

The beach was very crowded when I sketched this - our quiet retreat that we've been enjoying on and off over the last thirty years or so, has been discovered in a big way. There were many more people than I've painted here. One of the few really sunny days we had... and the only bits of me sticking out of cover - my inner knees - got horribly sunburnt! A few curious but polite children came to look over my shoulder. This was in my hand-folded Fabriano accordion sketchbook 250x175mm.

Back to the little moleskine and the first bemused attempts to capture the constant motion, colours and mysteries of the beautiful sea. What a joy, even though I feel I need another lifetime to even begin to succeed at this impossible task.

Home from the holiday

Hi!! I'm back ... it feels like a small eternity that I've been away and I'm almost overwhelmed at how much I've missed here in blogland, but also thoroughly refreshed by being removed from computers, scanners and virtual communing for what is actually a short time - thanks so much to everybody who left comments and greetings in the last couple of weeks - so very nice to come home to... almost as good as being leapt upon by Very Happy Dog , and pointedly ignored by So Cool Cat, who is punishing us for going AWOL. I'm sorry to present such sorry little sketches first up in 2009, but they are the fond product of much excitement at my Christmas presents from my dear thoughtful husband... a little Moleskine watercolour Notebook (heavily hinted at), and a set of W&N artist quality watercolour half-pans, in a beautifully crafted wooden box (complete surprise and beyond wildest expectations)I immediately planned to do a full sketch record of our journey from Johannesburg to Arniston (about the furthest point in SA you can go to from here), real, live and in the moment, but after these first frantic attempts at scenery flashing past, and waterbrush erratically bouncing from paint to paper, and quite uncontrollable marks making themselves despite my best efforts to control them - I knew I would have to re-think on how to get a long, long journey down on paper -if at all possible... I have travelled this road, with deviations, so many times - as a child with resignation and boredom and as much sleep as possible, and later with growing appreciation for the infinite variation of scenery... colour, light, tone, mood, season... now I know there are really no words or images to express the vastness of possible experience of this journey, and I just want to share as much of my small snippet that I can render with my limited means...Whew - a resting place... we stopped at Beaufort West in the Karoo and were delightfully surprised to find the B&B we'd booked into - La Paix - was new, clean and air-conditioned (memories of spending half the hot night swatting mozzies and the other half trying to find a comfy spot between the protruding bed-springs in 'Rooms', Colesburg - but that was a long time ago) as well as having a lush French-style garden bursting with grape-vines, fat blue agapanthus and lime trees, to relax in before bed between fresh white sheets... (I'm sounding like a travel-guide aren't I?) A bit of the last stretch to the coast - rolling soft mountains with clouds casting undulating shadows - I did these later from the tiny screen on my camera, trying to hang onto the immediacy but without the turbulence - I have a possible plan to continue with this idea, with the trip back home, where I conscientiously and regularly took photos as we went along, driving BFG and my son nuts with the chirrup of my perky camera starting up. But that's all for right now - it was lovely to be there, good to be back.

Galloping off

Some watercolour doodles* just to say... we're off again in a couple of days (still blinking from our lightning trip to Aus) to our regular holiday haven, Arniston, for the Easter weekend. I am taking my sketching things, and hope to be able to jot down some sights and impressions, but don't hold your breath, as it is an invitation to a roofwetting, and a wedding anniversary and I think there will be much socialising and little time to slink off on my own to paint. The weather looks as if it may misbehave, too, as it is here - making a good impression of a London winter, in Johannesburg at the moment.
*I love making these calligraphic marks with very wet watercolour and my cheap, but faithful Chinese goat-hair mop brush. Somehow when I'm trying to paint a 'proper' watercolour, I lose the free loose quality of the brush strokes - I suppose going for accuracy, which is obviously not a priority in these rather strangely-proportioned horses!

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide...

Well we've had a long power cut today - becoming a regular feature of Life in Johannesburg - thanks to amazing lack of foresight and planning...ugh, but I won't go into all that. I will think of something much more pleasant. One good thing about a powercut is that it forces you to leave your computer and tea-kettle and go outside and garden (which I did) and start a new drawing, which I did but it isn't finished yet. So I'm going to post some pages from an old sketchbook that I did one holiday at Arniston - my son is the little fisherman in the black & white sketch, so it was a long time ago.
Arniston is a wonderful historic village near Cape Aghullas - the southernmost tip of Africa, now also of course inevitably, a growing holiday resort, though the residents and owners have been (so far) quite committed to preserving its original nature. It's also called Waenhuiskrans, due to a cave on the shore that is big enough to hold an ox wagon with its team of oxen (though they would never have been able to get down there), and the original little white thatched-roof house fishing village is called Kassiesbaai - a vibrant and characterful community that still make their living taking their colourful little boats out every morning to catch whatever the trawlers have left them. We are very lucky to have good and generous friends who've invited us to share many an idyllic holiday in the sun and azure sea with them at their beach house. We have a little dream of retiring there one day...
Steps leading down to a white-pebbly beach. Ancient fisherman - strandlopers - built circular rock catchment areas to trap fish in at low tide
Some of the fishing boats pulled up the slipway with a few of the old Kassiesbaai houses sticking up in the background

One happy little boy lost in a world of his own - and hungry seagulls and cormorants ready to help him with his catch. The rocks on the beaches are smooth, round and white, but the cliffs are black and rough - agony to bare feet!