Kidsweek at Concourt

 I found an email in my blog inbox last week from the Director of the Constitutional Court Educational Programme, Paula Rainha - just in time to take up her invitation to come and sketch at the Constitutional Court with some children from Hillbrow. It was the last day of their Kidsweek, a holiday programme (coincidentally started years ago by a friend, Monique Dalka) where they came to learn and draw some of the aspects of the court. This was a sketch of a group of the kids who were drawing portraits from a wall of photographs of past and present judges.

They first went into the courtroom, to ask and hear about human rights, our constitution and the history and significance of the buildings. Constitutional Hill used to be the notorious Old Fort Prison Complex where many political activists, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Walter Sisulu were detained. Every detail of the court has been thoughtfully and beautifully designed by architects and artists. Two whole books have been published on the buildings and art here: A Light on the Hill and Art and Justice, I won't try and explain it all here...

...but for a start, the angled and mosaiced columns and wire leaf chandeliers in the foyer represent the tree under which African justice has traditionally taken place, transparent, participatory and accessible - which also appears in the Concourt logo. Long may its principles last...

Below is a sketch I did last year on a visit with a friend, of the outside entrance, with the long wooden doors carved by artists and Dumile Feni's 'History' sculpture. One of my very first, nervous urban sketches was done at a book launch here, back in 2008!

12.12.12

Well, I haven't got much to show, what with a small deluge of work coming in - just in time to go shopping :-), some very wet weather and preparations for the festive season. But I can't let the 12th of the 12th, 2012 go by without posting something, it's not going to come around again, certainly in my lifetime. So some sketches from earlier in the year of our dear 15-year old Weimeraner, Gucci and his biggest fan, Kenzo (although she happily and possessively hogs the whole bed if he's too slow getting there). I could draw endless combinations of the positions they get themselves into, as I think I've said before - yes, here, here  and so long ago - 2007! - here . When I look back at those, I do believe... yes, I think I have got a bit better at drawing the pets. Progress!

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.