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: