Historic Glenshiel

 My friend Anni arranged for us to go and sketch in the beautiful gardens of Glenshiel on Saturday, one of Johannesburg's historic Randlord homes, housing the Order of St John which ran it as an auxiliary military hospital during World War Two, and now as an ambulance service. I chose a view with plenty of flowers and foliage in the foreground so as not to have to tackle all that architecture, just having a manageable corner peep through. Even so, it took me most of the afternoon to get that little bit of building down.

After that effort I turned to a tiny house that I thought had been some lucky little girl's wendy house, but which I now read is 'Polly Ann', one of many similiar Tudor Style cottages that were built as a a fundraising effort during the war, forming 'Olde England" with a Wishing Well and a Town Sign Post - I was wondering what those were doing there!

And last, with my architectural skills exhausted, I sketched a gnarled old tree trunk before going on a stroll around the rest of the property, finding a rose garden, a waterfall with a pond, plenty of nooks and crannies and a beautiful view over the Northern suburbs - plenty to go back for if we get another chance.

Jacaranda Joburg

Purple, purple everywhere right now - the jacarandas breathtakingly taking over the city - above our heads, below our feet as the fallen blossoms cover the streets, and wherever you turn. Trying to photograph and paint them, it seems impossible to really portray their glowing abundance of colour. On the left I tried splashing and dropping it on, emulating the flowers that drop constantly onto my page, and above, rolling the brush loaded with the staining dioxazine violet around the page to build darker tones but still trying to keep them light and luminous.

We're having a heat wave, and these scenes of women walking with umbrellas and pushing the prams of the babies they take care of are everywhere up and down the shady avenues - pure summer in Johannesburg!



Roaming around Rosebank

Wow, this blog has hit 300 followers and I can't see any of them on this page or in my dashboard - I still haven't figured out why - but thank you! Sorry for another long break, I've been doing a bit of work, and dithering around with all sorts of projects, getting out to sketch now and then...

 Cranks restaurant in Rosebank, from under a lovely jacaranda tree that I squeezed onto the edges. The jacarandas are out all over Joburg now, not as prolifically flowering as usual, but still magnificent.

Then I had lunch in another sidewalk café, sketching people in the restaurant opposite

 A few days later - a booksale in a Rosebank courtyard - my friend Anni, and I tried sketching from another viewpoint and were chased away by a security guard, so we asked the book sales people if we could sit close to them - next to another security guard - if we promised not to raid the till, and escaped the 'loiterer police' long enough to get down some browsing figures

After which we were ready for a cup of tea- and we drew the Friday after-work crowd gathering around us in peace

And an attempt to sketch people walking briskly past - still loving the waterbrush filled with Ecoline for this!

Sketchcrawl #33

Sketches from Saturday's Worldwide Sketchcrawl - our merry group of four went to Parkview, a suburb with a lovely villagey shopping area. We started with the very intricate newly renovated building at the top. The metal fretwork is called 'broekielace' here, referring to the lace on undies! - and is found on old buildings all over South Africa. We moved on to the fruit & veg shop, where we had to sketch fast as the sun came over and started to bake us and our watercolours - and then to the Anglican church of St Francis which had some welcome shade, a lovely garden to sit in, and music as a choir practised inside the building! On the left, a regular artist in Parkview, painting the buildings on canvases which he sells to passers by.

Sketching Woes

Oh my, after a couple of weeks of slow, contemplative painting I went out this weekend for some fast on-the-spot sketching and was all at a loss as to where to begin, middle or end. Its scary how quickly the confident line escapes when not in daily practice! But for the sake of keeping the blog updated, I'll post some of my not-great sketches anyway, and hope to do some better ones soon.

I went to the Rose Gardens in the nearby park on Saturday - the early roses not quite out yet but lots of springily dressed young women, with many photos being taken on mobile phones of poses amongst the fountains and trees.

Yesterday I drove into the city, to Main Street Life, an 70's industrial building that is under refurbishment and together with Arts on Main down the road, is an island of art, good accomodation and cultural activity in an otherwise rather grubby, ugly part of Joburg. The rooftop of the building was the venue for a charity event, 1000 Drawings, where people are invited to draw or doodle on A5 paper to be sold on one night in November for R100 each regardless of artist or artwork. Excited to see the city so close, I had to try a cityscape sketch, and then turned to the other drawers - no one that I noticed was sketching the surroundings or people, most were bent over their own creations of  doodles and illustrations. I continued to struggle to get down a flowing, happy line, but by the last sketch, thought it was slowly returning to my faltering pen. Must not leave it in my bag for so long again!!

Northcliff Hill

After weeks of gorgeous Spring weather our little band of only three sketchers decided to go up to the second highest point in Johannesburg, Northcliff Hill for the 360° view. It turned out to be a cold, windy, overcast day so John and I, in our light spring-y clothing, cowered beneath the ridge where we couldn't see much of the scenery, but were at least out of the grip of the chilly blast. Barbara came a bit better prepared in a warm jacket, so perched on a rock with more of a vantage point, and sketched us!

 I sketched the landmark Northcliff water tower, struggling with perspective again - although the top of the tower IS wider than the bottom, should I paint it so?... I thought not but should have - mine doesn't look much like the real thing - when John posts his version you'll see what it does look like! I spotted a little bit of Joburg skyline in between the long grass and somebody's eagle's eye home - what a place to live!

When our chattering teeth interfered too much with our sketching abilities, we decided to go back down to the suburbs and warm up over coffee and lunch at the Mugg & Bean. I faced the view that attracted me most - the display of yummy looking cakes and pies, managing to control my impulse to order one of each by drawing them instead.

Earlier in the week I had been painting a mural for the local primary school concert, as I mentioned before. I took a small break to sketch the children rehearsing below where I was on the stage, in the hall - very sweet but very lively and multitudinous!!

Glazed over

I've been painting more, sketching less lately (as well as painting the backdrop for our local primary school's annual concert again, many years after my children left there and grew up) so another long absence here - I attended the final session of Greg Kerr's course I posted about here, last week after missing the third one while on my travels. This was about learning how to glaze with oil paints - the images gleaned from our original source material - mine being on 12"x12" canvases, my ladies with umbrella, black and white cow, wooden fence and seed pod, which I changed from a honey-locust to a jacaranda - an attempt at iconography, but too hard and complicated to explain!

One panel started with a bolus, or red oxide ground, the layers of warm and cool colours built up slowly and patiently, drying well between each one (hard for somebody used to instant results with pen and watercolour)

One on a white ground, where the layers produced much more brilliantly coloured results, and took a lot longer to get to neutral shades and depth of tone.

 And on a green ground, which produced different results again of the layers of transparent colour - we were to lift out areas from each glaze to preserve colours we wanted to keep. The white crayon outline of the original drawing ended up as the 'radioactive' glow around the cow.

We finished the paintings off by adding veils of pure colour, and lastly, very sparingly, white. They are very dark, shiny (because of the Liquin used as medium) little paintings, hard to photograph, and I don't know if I would paint like this as a rule, but I'm very happy to know how to do it.
We worked on our three acrylic paintings too with oil glazes, tying them together as a triptych, lifting and knocking back, and I learnt another blending technique with the fan brush, which I've never quite known what to do with, to get a highly polished looking finish - still thinking about those. I feel, at last, as though I'm getting to know exactly what to do with the wonderful 40th birthday present my husband gave me mphwmph years ago of a bunch of oil paints, canvases and brushes!