Parkview Christmas Market

Christmas Markets have been in full swing in Joburg - getting their business done before everyone disappears to the coast for the holidays. I went to this one in Parkview on Saturday - it has been so hot and sunny but the weather turned cold, wet and grey, unfortunately for everyone who worked hard to put this together, and the charities that benefit. Still, quite a few turned up and it went on over three days, so I hope they made a good profit.
Lots to draw, with musicians, jugglers, dancers, pretty stalls, children and angels - and Father Christmas scandalously dressed in blue for his sponsor. I think I wasn't the only one put off, some of the children looked at him very doubtfully!

Too much purple?

 You might be getting sick of these trees by now, but on Saturday we went up a high hill - to where the University of Johannesburg's (UJ) soccer fields are - and the jacarandas were just everywhere. I'm always puzzling as to how to paint them, this time I used a small sea sponge to try and capture their light, airy quality.

It seems a waste to designate these sweeping views of the city and suburbs to playing fields, but I guess if there were hotels and private homes up there, it would be a lot harder to access them. As it was we had to get permission from the university - luckily one of our regular sketchers is a professor there, so no problem.

We sat just below one of Joburg's two iconic towers, the Sentech (previously Brixton) Tower, and looked out towards the other one, the Hillbrow Tower, in the middle of about the densest, diciest area of town. Brixton Tower (left) used to have a restaurant at the base, and a viewing deck, and Hillbrow had a revolving restaurant at the top, but both were closed down in the turbulent Eighties, in case they became a target for guerilla attacks. Those were the days when we were searched or scanned going into any public space or shopping centre, afraid of our own shadows and sure that calamity and civil war were around the corner. Hard to remember that, sitting up there in peaceful shade, students who would never have been allowed the opportunity to study here in those days, cheerily greeting us as they walked past.

A footnote: I was asked about the colours I used to get the purple - I use Winsor & Newton almost exclusively as it's easily available here - and it is mainly Winsor Violet in different concentrations, lifted and dabbed with the sponge to lighten it, with touches of Permanent Rose here and there.  I added Viridian Green to the W.Violet in the shadowy bits, the two combined make lovely greys - and touches of Smalt, or Du Pont's Blue, which was a free trial tube I got some years ago. I love the way it granulates on the paper, I think if I did a big painting of jacarandas I would use it with Permanent Rose to help create the texture of the massed flowers - hope it's still available! Here is a strip of these colours:

End of the Dinner Party

 I've just come to the end of this year's Greg Kerr (website currently under construction) painting course, "The Dinner Party", which once again has been a fascinating, informative and unpredictable ride through the world of painting, art and artists, as well as really fun, sociable interludes throughout the year.

It started with researching and making Valentine cards for 5 artists, plus yourself, as preparation for the course. During the first week we painted place settings for each one in acrylic, glazed and embellished later if needed in oils. As prep for the following session we had to make and photograph clay models of the artists at a dinner table, in a setting, which we drew up carefully and painted in class onto one canvas and freely painted onto a second, using oil glazing methods.

In September, we were introduced to a process called Decalcomania, where we covered our place-setting paintings with plastic, repainted the images thickly in primary and secondary colours in acrylic, and then quickly transferred to a new canvas of the same size, repeated as many times as was necessary for a rich textured surface. This process produced unexpected and random results; blobs, blotches, textures, misregisterings, all of which were part of the grand plan.

On these printed images we were to cool down and warm up chosen areas (Mavis and Fred in Greg's unique terminology!) to make them recede or come forward, and then go through a list of possible interventions to challenge us, develop a dialogue with the work, and create an interesting patina and history - including more decalcomania, patterning, glazing, shadows, wet-in-wet and dry brush painting.

The entire project has upended my 'normal' way of doing things - which I welcome wholeheartedly, bored as I often get with my faithful renderings of things and people - but challenging and perplexing it certainly is...and am still busy with, so no final results to show you as yet, but here are some pictures of the process so far.

That Jacaranda Time again

This seems to come around faster and faster every year - jacaranda blossom time. They aren't as spectacular as usual in Johannesburg, perhaps because we've had early rains and I think the flowers need a little stress to perform really well - perhaps like all of us. I was not too stressed, it was a lovely sunny morning and I met three sketcher friends in a tranquil side street in Westcliff where we spent a relaxed couple of hours. I did exaggerate the purple, it was there, but sparsely scattered - hard to paint without getting finicky. I started with the bottom one in my watercolour Moleskine with rather a fat brush - a Van Gogh goats hair one that I 've loved for years but which has now lost its point and is losing its hair. 
I switched to some long neglected Caran d'Ache Neocolor II watersoluble crayons which I've never mastered (but haven't spent much time trying). With only 12 basic colours, the middle one is startlingly vivid where I put in street signs, bougainvillea, some yellow and orange  flowers and a bit of a jacaranda - I reined myself in a bit on the last top one of Alan and Marlene sitting picturesquely under the trees.
Previous posts on jacarandas are here, here, here and here if you're interested.

New Chinatown

For the 37th Worldwide Sketchcrawl, Joburg Sketchers went to 'New' Chinatown - old Chinatown in the city centre has fallen into dilapidation, but in the suburb of Cyrildene, a busy, thriving community has sprung up over the last few years. Fantastically fresh vegetables spill out onto the pavements, grown in the gardens of the surrounding houses - and tea shops, restaurants, fishmongers, hairdressers, Chinese massage and therapy studios, supermarkets full of strange, unidentifiable products, so much to draw. A good turnout of seven, we started on the veggie shop near our meeting point, then trickled up the road finding other viewpoints. We met up for lunch at 'Northern Chinese Restaurant', a humble looking place, but with delicious, plentiful and very reasonable food. We should have kept it for last - we all ate far too much, sketching after that was a bit slow and most of us felt the need to go home for a little nap soon after.

Swan Lake

I was invited to go sketching last month with friends at Gallagher Estate, a business conference centre which, I was told, has gardens which are Midrand's best kept secret. I almost refused, as the next day I had to go into hospital, but instead of staying home getting more and more nervous, I decided to go along.

Behind the imposing gates, and past the huge exhibition centres and parking garages, we met up in a green, woodsy tearoom area, with the peaceful sound of trickling water taking us far away from the 'suits' discussing important stuff inside. After coffee, we wandered down through stone pathways and over pretty bridges, arriving eventually at a tree-lined pond, scattered about with bright orange clivia blooms, and two magnificent swans floating serenely over the surface, gently rippling the reflections....Not!! As soon as we sat down and started taking out our sketchpads, the huge birds began rushing at us, glaring out of beady eyes hidden in their black masks, swishing up waves in front of their chests, and very obviously telling us to back off, get lost, and get the hell out of there! We gingerly retreated to slightly higher ground, behind some rocks and trees and sat at the chairs and tables, which seemed to appease them slightly, though they carried on swimming away, then whooshing up to remind us to keep our distance. They must have had eggs or chicks - cygnets (thanks Bridget ;-) somewhere to be so aggressive. We at last settled down to lose our fright in trying to capture the dark reflections and the deceptively pure white grace of the scary swans.

But one brave - or daffy - sketcher persisted in getting closer and was eventually attacked - she fended them off with her bag and sketchbook but was bashed hard on the leg with a muscular wing. The swans were then so irritated that when two unsuspecting business execs came out of their meeting for some fresh air and sat on a bench nearby, one drew itself up into full battle mode - I grabbed a brushload of dark paint off my palette and sploshed down the alarming form - with neck doubled up on itself, chest thrust forward, wings akimbo and back arched and fluffed even larger. It slapped its great feet down like claps of thunder beating towards them. I think I thought it would back off so I didn't warn them, but they noticed it just in time to leap behind their bench to safety. Whew - we all behaved after that and finished our sketches at a respectful distance, all thoughts of scalpels and anaesthetics successfully banished from my mind!

Nia Dancing

While I'm not quite ready for any of the extreme activity I tried to portray in these sketches, I'm at least able to look at them again without wincing. Thank you for all the well wishes here and elsewhere, I appreciate them all so much and am recuperating steadily!

This was a Nia dancing 'jam' held at moyo restaurant at Zoo Lake on the first day of Spring last month. Barbara, Anni and I went along for some more action sketching. All and sundry were invited to join this stretching, energising class after the torpor of winter and we on the sidelines were tempted to discard our sketchbooks and join in, it looked so much fun. It was fun to sketch too, once we'd (well, I) got over stage fright - we were welcomed to come in, watch and sketch and the dancers seemed to appreciate us appreciating their agile creativity.

I've been asked again for tips on drawing moving figures so I've tried to analyse what I did here. It does differ with the amount and pace of movement - this was very fast in comparison to the Tango lesson of two posts ago, where the same actions were repeated over fairly slowly so I had more time to study the shapes of arms, legs, backs etc.

• Remember, none of these are definitive captures of a single pose or body position, as in a snapshot. They are the results of watching the movements of a group, scribbling down fleeting impressions of, for instance, outstretched arms, then watching some more and adding a torso, fitting it to what's been put down, looking again to catch a leg position - perhaps from your original subject, perhaps from somebody else who has moved into your field of vision - attaching as logically as possible to what's happening in the rest of the figure.

• Clothing, hair, head gear or scarves can help to create the impression of movement, flowing wavy lines or creases across a torso describing a sideways stretch or a swooping lunge.

• Try and relax into the movement of  your pen or brush - this may only happen deep into your sketching session - allow it to dance lightly around your page. I sometimes find myself 'conducting' the music in the air with my brush before lowering it to the page and constraining it into body shapes while keeping some of the swirling, twirling motion of my baton.

• Feel within your body the music, the rhythm, the big shapes of the dancer's bodies as well as the smaller ones of hands and feet - see this sketch with arms stretching upwards - by no means accurately drawn hands, but imitating the many fingers flickering together in the air. If you look at some of the individual limbs, hands and feet I've sketched, there are some weird shapes and renditions, but as a whole, give the impression of movement, stretches, lunges, etc.

• To analyse and store in your 'memory bank' some of the postures bodies can get into during sport or exercise, try pausing your TV during a programme like 'So You Think You Can Dance' (a favourite of mine!) and sketch what you see, you'll be surprised at the odd shapes limbs can get into in the middle of a pas de deux!

Does all of that make sense?... probably not, but I hope it helps somebody, somewhere, somewhat! Do let me know if so.

...Aaa..a..nd rest!!