Royal Zambezi

I decided to expand this to a family affair by posting my daughter Alexandra's gouache sketches she made while on holiday in Zambia last month. Bruce and I were there two years ago, and I'm ashamed to say it didn't even occur to me to take a sketchbook! The gorgeous no-comforts-barred lodge http://www.royalzambezilodge.com/index2.php belongs to my brother-in-law and sister, who've invited us to share some of their holidays there... wildlife literally roam right through the camp at night - you need to stay in your bungalow (picture on the left) so as not to bump into a hippo or an ellie on a midnight stroll! Incredible and abundant birdlife, and the gasping and grunting of hippos wake you up in the morning... just wilderness bliss.
At top right is the wonderful 'sausage tree' of enormous girth, that hosts the pub and it's viewing deck. The vertical squiggles are of the striking maroon and yellow flower bracts that then produce huge bizarre-looking sausage shaped fruit - according to Palgraves 'Trees of Southern Africa', used by indigenous people for purposes ranging from curing syphilis and rheumatism to a poultice for making babies fat!
The crocodile drawing is of a wooden carving, but there are plenty of real crocs lurking on the banks of the river. They certainly keep still enough to draw from, if you don't alarm them into sliding into the water, which in turn alarms you if you're sitting in a canoe with your sketchbook!

Sunny Sunday

A watercolour sketch of our back garden I did on Sunday - a beautiful day on which my family was all occupied with their own activities, so I gathered my long neglected paints and ventured out. I was trying to remember a quote I read recently about watercolour painting being a state of careful looking, and then flat panic, as that is exactly what I felt as I began placing the first tentative strokes and then necessarily and seemingly uncontrollably gained momentum. When I stopped for a breather, I was surprised to find a fair, if clumsy representation on the paper.

Me, myself, I

I've been painting in my studio this week, which is always a good thing, but lacking a model willing to sit for me, I resorted to trying some self-portraits - something I haven't done for ten years. The last time I had recently turned forty, so it was a pretty sobering exercise to tackle my 50+ image.

The first one I mercilessly and doggedly recorded every wrinkle, bump, sag and bag resulting in a recognisable, but cruel rendition which upset my husband, who thought I had done myself (and him) a deep injustice. The second I tried to be kinder, but still truthful, and it turned out to be a rather boring painting and I'm pretty sure, younger than reality. So maybe I'll keep on trying - I don't necessarily want total accuracy, but I do want something interesting my children might want to hang on their walls one day, without frightening the grandchildren!

I'm probably too impatient to do good portraits - I just have to finish them in one day, and can't bear to go back and fiddle.

Seasons come and seasons go

Two pages from my sketch journal… 5 months ago when the colours in the garden were turning from heavy, thick green to all the autumnal shades. My nephew Tristan and his wife Anna had just had a baby boy in London. That seems only weeks ago, but the garden is already bursting out of its winter browns, baby Henry has moved to Australia with his mum, dad and big brother, and I have done very little painting and sketching in the meantime.
I am in awe of expert blogger Katherine Tyrell, who writes her informative and inspiring ‘Making a Mark’ blog so regularly, as well as keeping her many Squidoo lenses going AND doing what look like pretty intricate and time consuming coloured pencil paintings. It takes me hours just to read a couple of my favourite art blogs, keep up with some of the links she posts, post my irregular little contributions here and occasionally dash off a new sketch in my journal. This ‘Spring’ one was done in hasty and economical line one day – the 6th of September – and coloured some days later, peering at the scene from the window as I didn’t seem to have the time to go outside with my paints and do it properly – and only posted today, a week later (the pink blossoms have already fallen off). We’re all busy, but some people seem to just fit way more into their day than others.
I think for now, ‘A Sketch in Time’ has to be more about pictures than words – it takes me so long to compose a little bit of writing, I am definitely out of practice - but making more art is my main aim, so for the meantime that is where I’ll try and focus.

A poem

I've been reading a book - 'ten poems to open your heart' by Roger Housden, and this poem by Galway Kinnell did just strike a deep chord in me... who of us (especially mothers!) haven't felt that sow-like feeling, or have walked past someone else who is so humble/downtrodden/looked down upon, and uncomfortably looked away. So I copied it into my journal - my loopy inward-looking journal, not the shiny happy one - and drew a sow as I remember them long ago on my Uncle John's farm in Zimbabwe, long since obliterated. Huge, patient, smelly, repulsive, her only purpose to produce and feed the squealing pink piglets attached to her belly. Yet there was something entirely noble and beautiful about her, which she surely deserves to be blessed for.

Old Friends

Oops - I didn't get this sketch into the last post as intended...

Walk the Talk

Yay! I have been doing some drawing - though I'm afraid they were from photos that I took, as in the first one, the walkers were just trotting past too quickly, in the Radio 702 Walk the Talk fundraiser in Johannesburg last month, and in the second, I felt too self conscious to whip out my sketchbook - a common malaise of mine.

On Sunday my church celebrated it's Centenary, and before the festivities began, I spotted Daphne (about 91) and Vi (in her eighties somewhere) sitting in the garden chatting - looking towards the little 'Garden of Remembrance' where the ashes of many of their friends and family are laid. It made me think how very short a time a hundred years is (I am already over the halfway mark) but how much can happen and change. From horse carriages to spacecraft, from uncontrollable disease and pestillence to organ transplants and beyond...

As far as my sketches go, I like the looser ones of the walkers - helped by putting the pictures on slideshow to draw from. The 'old friends' is stiffer, too controlled, what usually happens when drawing from a photograph.