James Hall Transport Museum

It was International Museum Day on Monday, and to mark it, on Saturday our sketching group motored over to the James Hall Museum of Transport on the other side of the city. As we wandered around the halls crammed with metal, rubber and chrome I admit my heart sank a bit at the prospect of trying to draw some of these mechanical beasts with all their precise angles, lines and engineerings. But down one rather dusty row of cars waiting for restoration I spotted a curvy, lumpy old character that took me straight back to my childhood and my grandparent's home and car in the (then) little seaside town of Hermanus.

My mother stretching to see over the unfamiliar wood and leather dashboard and straining to turn the big circle of steering wheel, my sister and I bouncing around the roomy back seat excited to be the first to see the blue of the sea, smell the smells of Sea&Ski suntan lotion, icecream, salt and sand, peering through the slatted blind of the tiny back window... I'm not even sure it was the same kind of car (I am of the ilk that describes cars as 'red' or 'black') but I was away, drawing and appreciating the beauty of these relics at last. Such craftsmanship, attention to detail and solid gravitas, the more you looked the more there was to love.
Joburg Sketchers produced an impressive set of sketches of a fraction of the collection of this wonderful museum - another place we'll just have to go back to!

Rocks, Pools, Waves

I'm back from a wonderful, relaxed ten days down in the Eastern Cape - in the little hamlet of Kidds Beach where my family have been spending holidays for generations and which holds many happy memories.

It was quiet after all the holiday-makers had returned to work - we are rejoicing in no longer having to stick to school holidays to take our breaks!

As you can see, I had time to sketch, as well as walk, read, swim, sleep... I found a great watercolour book at our extended family's home, 'Mastering Color & Design in Watercolor' by Christopher Schink, which I studied and took copious notes from, and tried to use some of his exercises in these sketches (using mostly watercolour, with some Inktense crayons). The colours in that rock pool are exaggerated, but when you stare at them for ages, they seem so brilliant! There were beautiful long white beaches too, where we walked and swam, but my husband and son fished from the rocks so that is where I sat too. Trying to paint the sea and rocks is completely absorbing, time flies and I felt I'd just begun when it was time to leave. I can see why some artists spend a lifetime trying to capture it.

A Little Break

A repost of a 2009 sketch just to say, I'm off to see the sea for a few days, lucky me! I'm looking forward to long walks, staring at the waves and rocks, and perhaps trying to get some of it onto paper. An old expression my grandmother used to say: "Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits" sounds good to me!

A Little Break

I'm posting this very rough, quick sketch I did on a cold, wet, windy beach over the Easter weekend - just to say I'm still here, or at least I'm back. We went down to the Cape for a break with friends in their beach cottage, where we mostly slept, read, talked, ate and drank some lovely champagne. All in all a wonderful restful week in which I refused to feel guilty for not being more productive, a goal in which the appalling weather co-operated greatly! After that we went to Cape Town for the other purpose of our journey - a big 40 year reunion of our school matric class, which turned out to be a completely happy experience renewing old friendships and making some new ones.
Lots to do and catch up on now that we're back - I hope it's not too long before I have something to show you again here!

Sunshine and light

First of all, I want to thank each one of you who left comments on my previous post, and on Urban Sketchers - I was bowled over by the warmth, empathy and defensive outrage that supportively flooded my inbox, as well as from friends who phoned and emailed. It really made a bitter pill easier to glug down and reminds me again that most people are good, very good - kind and loving. Thank you, thank you! After a period of adrenaline over-supply, in which I cleaned and scrubbed and sorted, came a few days of exhaustion and resignation, and then a pull towards colour, light, innocence and freedom from care and worry. I found an old black and white photo of myself taken on Grotto Beach, Hermanus in the Cape - one of very few photos of me as a child - that perfectly encapsulated those qualities for me, and tried to paint it in colour... well anxiety and watercolour didn't mix too well - my flat washes were anything but, my figure was murky (left), but I quite liked the way the umbrellas and loose figures came out on the beach. I tried the girl figure again (right), and started a new painting with all together on a clean sheet of paper, which must be old and heat damaged (my studio bakes in summer), as it just sucked up the paint and allowed nothing to flow at all. So I resorted to Photopaint and put the cleaner figure on the beach (below), and then flattened and intensified my sky and darkened the figure in the shadow - in the top painting. If only one could manipulate life (and watercolour) so easily!

After this exercise I'm looking forward more than ever to Hazel Soan's workshop next month, in which the aim will be to maintain fresh vibrant watercolour, with immediacy, boldness, liveliness - with strong depth of colour and light and shade - I know I've had moments in watercolour where I've achieved some of that, but it all seems to have escaped me right now - roll on March 15th!

The Fairest Cape

We're just back from a visit to Cape Town, for a birthday and a short holiday. We thought we'd be going into the notorious Cape of Storms, with weather forecasts of raging gales and torrential rain as we left Joburg - but after a day or two of drizzle and greyness, we got "The Fairest Cape in all the World" (Sir Francis Drake) instead - sparkling sunshine, blue and white sea, awe-inspiring mountains, autumnal vineyards... at its best it has to be about the most beautiful place on earth!We did lots of socialising and driving (had to take full advantage of unlimited free miles in the hired car!) so my watercolours remained untouched and the sketching I did was in 15 to 20 minute sessions, usually around a meal. The sketch above was done from the 'Green Room' we rented in Camps Bay high above the sea, which was a good thing, as that was where all the storm action was. I added colour at home from photos - the day I sketched it was grey and misty. I've gazed in awe at these magnificent cliffside homes over the years and never dreamt I'd ever get to stay in one. As our hostess said, they found a piece of paradise when they bought here 20 or so years ago.

This was over breakfast on Sunday morning from a beachfront café - everything was lined up in rows...waves, cars (I managed to draw the back of a car resting on the front of an SUV - it wasn't really so!) , palm trees, umbrellas, restaurants... We went for a walk along the beach later and saw the aftermath of the storm - thick cappacino foam all over the sea and sand, kelp knotted around every protuberance and beach chairs that were chained together to a post broken, battered and buried. Who would be a sailor!?
An inexpertly pieced together montage of photos taken from the road at the back of our apartment - the mountain range called the Twelve Apostles

Oh I do like to be beside...

This whole vacation I was struck by the many striations (striata?) of every vista - sea, land and sky - almost like handwriting across the landscape. There were lots of clouds all the time, probably causing the horizontal bands and streaks on every surface.

More pages from my moleskine notebook... while I'm posting these holiday sketches I'm trying to get my house, and after that my studio, in order so I can get back to 'work' (though I can't think of it as work :o). My daughters took turns to house- and pet-sit while we were away and if I tell you that I first had to clean the vacuum cleaner before I could vacuum, wash the mop before I could mop, and rinse out the washing machine and dishwasher before... well you get an idea of what a mess we are in! The studio has become a bit of a general dumping ground, I'm going to have to assert myself there again - and then I might get to making plans for the New Year - by which time it'll probably be February!

Seaside studies

The beach was very crowded when I sketched this - our quiet retreat that we've been enjoying on and off over the last thirty years or so, has been discovered in a big way. There were many more people than I've painted here. One of the few really sunny days we had... and the only bits of me sticking out of cover - my inner knees - got horribly sunburnt! A few curious but polite children came to look over my shoulder. This was in my hand-folded Fabriano accordion sketchbook 250x175mm.

Back to the little moleskine and the first bemused attempts to capture the constant motion, colours and mysteries of the beautiful sea. What a joy, even though I feel I need another lifetime to even begin to succeed at this impossible task.

Wishful thinking

It's behaving like a tumble-dryer outside - hot dry wind blasting - and Vivienne's little sketches of bluebottles made me hanker after some cool damp sand and sea and gentle breezes. I did this large watercolour (37x55cm - I've very badly joined different scans together as you can see) after collecting the shells on a holiday in the Eastern Cape, where shells and sponges and corals are varied and plentiful - or they were last time we looked. I tried to reproduce the patterns they made on the sand as the waves pulled back, but I couldn't make it look wet and glistening and sparkly as it should be. It's not very successful as a painting - I think I might cut it up into pieces and make smaller compositions for cards or little gifts. I love painting shells... I still have a bag of them somewhere. All the talk on blogs I've been reading lately has been about

working in series, which I think would be an excellent idea for me, as I'm so artistically scattered (and scatty!) at the moment.

But shells in hot dry highveld Johannesburg - perhaps not!

Too much for my palette

The chap who asked for the landscape a la Meyer, doesn't want that after all, but would now like a huge watercolour (a full sheet of Fabriano - what's that, about 1200x900mm?) of his children in the sea, with whole mountain ranges and reflections and two reasonable likenesses and sky with clouds and sandbanks and currents... each one of them a challenge in their own right, and altogether just beyond me. Does anyone do such big land/figurescapes in watercolour? I said no, I couldn't take it on - I saw myself throwing my entire stock of pricey little tubes of colour all over that humungous piece of paper, and sweating and swearing as I tried to spread and control them... makes me hyperventilate just thinking about it. So I did this little (148x105mm) sketch of the kids, with an itty bit of the sea - I think it's actually a lagoon - and mountains to give him as a 'thanks but no thanks' to go back with the photo album. The likenesses are pretty good, (though I don't know them, so can't be sure) but the reflections are fussy and the water overworked and the mountain darkly ominous and he'll probably think he had a narrow escape, but I think it's quite nice of me.

Rock pools

I've had a busy sort of a week, so nothing new to post, but as I'm also using this blog as a record, this is an old watercolour of my son at the rock pools at Kidds Beach, Eastern Cape - a place with very precious memories for all our family. It's painted from a photograph taken by my sister Gillian, who always takes beautiful photographs, and remembers to take them at special times in her and our lives - unlike me, who has big holes in her albums. I submitted this to a local watercolour society competition and it came back with the comment - 'Nice reflections, dog has three legs'... which put me in my place! I'm sorry I cropped it at the top - there was plenty of paper left up there, and room for the sea and sky to tower over the little figures. And I made my very blonde child into a brunette, overworking the hair.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide...

Well we've had a long power cut today - becoming a regular feature of Life in Johannesburg - thanks to amazing lack of foresight and planning...ugh, but I won't go into all that. I will think of something much more pleasant. One good thing about a powercut is that it forces you to leave your computer and tea-kettle and go outside and garden (which I did) and start a new drawing, which I did but it isn't finished yet. So I'm going to post some pages from an old sketchbook that I did one holiday at Arniston - my son is the little fisherman in the black & white sketch, so it was a long time ago.
Arniston is a wonderful historic village near Cape Aghullas - the southernmost tip of Africa, now also of course inevitably, a growing holiday resort, though the residents and owners have been (so far) quite committed to preserving its original nature. It's also called Waenhuiskrans, due to a cave on the shore that is big enough to hold an ox wagon with its team of oxen (though they would never have been able to get down there), and the original little white thatched-roof house fishing village is called Kassiesbaai - a vibrant and characterful community that still make their living taking their colourful little boats out every morning to catch whatever the trawlers have left them. We are very lucky to have good and generous friends who've invited us to share many an idyllic holiday in the sun and azure sea with them at their beach house. We have a little dream of retiring there one day...
Steps leading down to a white-pebbly beach. Ancient fisherman - strandlopers - built circular rock catchment areas to trap fish in at low tide
Some of the fishing boats pulled up the slipway with a few of the old Kassiesbaai houses sticking up in the background

One happy little boy lost in a world of his own - and hungry seagulls and cormorants ready to help him with his catch. The rocks on the beaches are smooth, round and white, but the cliffs are black and rough - agony to bare feet!