Pencil sketching

A ramshackle horse cart made from bits of old cars, school desks, office and garden chairs and goodness knows what, that cruises around local suburbs collecting garden refuse to take to the dump for a small fee 



Anni sketching in a café after our last
sketchday at the koppies

 Here are a few pencil sketches I've done fairly recently - I don't sketch very much in pencil for some reason, although I enjoy it when I do. Perhaps it's because the drawings sometimes look a bit smudgy and pale after they've been bashed around in a sketchbook for a few years. But somehow, Karim Ajania of Pencils for Africa came across my watersoluble pencil sketch at the Salvage Yard a few posts ago, and asked to do an interview with me, and another with my friend Anni, who was also sketching at the salvage yard that day.
Pencils for Africa collects used pencils in the USA and sends them to impoverished children in Africa, recycling them as a sort of relay and as a human connection of the pencils being drawn and written with from one side of the world to the other. Just read this touching story Breaking Pencils if you think kids in Africa couldn't use a previously owned pencil or two!
I apologise for all the links in this short post - I could give you lots more fascinating ones from Pencils for Africa, like the one about a professional pencil sharpener, and someone who carves pencils into incredibly intricate tiny sculptures - but I hope you'll cruise around the site for yourself, and maybe send Karim some of your pencils to go off travelling to someone who will truly appreciate them!


A quick, rather nervous sketch of young lions resting in the shade on our trip to Zambia in July last year



Marlene and me

I was just doodling, really, with watercolour and brown ink today - using a picture of Gwen Stefani from a magazine to try out a watercolour portrait, when serendipitously (long word!) an interview started on Radio 702 with Jenny Crwys-Williams talking to Marlene Dumas, whose first SA exhibition starts at the Standard Bank Gallery tonight, having ended it's run in Cape Town. (She is well-known for her watercolour portraits, many of which are taken from magazine images, and sometimes of 'celebrities'. We're obviously totally in synch, us two famous artists!)
I am very proud to boast that I was at Michaelis School of Fine Art at the very same time as Marlene, and remember her well as a beautiful, lively and friendly person around the campus. She, of course, was a Fine Art student, already causing a bit of a stir - I remember her having her photo taken with all the lecturers in the quad, probably when she was chosen to take up her scholarship in Amsterdam - while I was a lowly and not very dedicated Graphic Design student. How I wish I could have those years back and take full advantage of the opportunities I didn't realise I had at that time...maybe I would also be selling paintings for millions of dollars by now... well I can dream, can't I?