A Deep Purple Breather

I'm still up to my ears in my big illustration job and will be for at least the next three weeks - hundreds of little scenarios showing public health problems and how to deal with them, involving many confusing briefs, sketches, instructions and changes to all of the above... I'm through the pencil rough stage and busy with line drawings, next is colouring them all up in Photopaint....ooh my burning neck!

But I have got out now and then for a breath of air and some happy sloshing around with paint. It's jacaranda season (almost over already) so I just had to join sketcher friends in one of the purple shrouded avenues that grid the city and try once again to capture their glow. This one was actually sold after its appearance on our Joburg Sketchers page (thank you Peggy, if you read this!) I'll tell you soon about another lovely painting weekend, but it'll need a bit of work to show and tell... in the meantime, back to the drawing board.

A Heritage House - and portraits galore!

On a hot Saturday four of us went sketching at two early Johannesburg heritage homes in Parktown - built in 1903 and 1904 (Joburg is not very old is it?) One houses the National Children's Theatre and this one that I drew, theatre workshops for children; so every now and then bands of kids poured in and out of the building, whom I sketched as fast as I could. Those who know more about architecture than I do, thought the design and proportions were a bit weird - so I'll blame the wonkiness on that - wouldn't be my sketch would it!?

The Night of a 1000 Drawings was crazy - my friends Anni and John came with me to sketch portraits. After a slow start while we dithered about where and how to start, at last a little girl, Alexia, came up and asked for a portrait - and was unfazed when all three of us focused on her! Then another quiet patch until I approached a young woman and got her to sit for us - then suddenly there were queues forming and people clamouring, we got two more chairs and each of us had to sketch to beat the band  - literally as the night wore on, the party hotted up and the music got louder! I grabbed a few blurry photos (I'm good at those!) but didn't have time to get a record of all of them. We must have done at least 9 or 10 sketch portraits each before, with burning eyes and cramping fingers, we called it
a night - to remember! 

About 3000 drawings were hung up around the huge Sci-Bono Centre on washing lines. People had to buy envelopes with stickers for R100 each, wait for the bell to go and then place their stickers on the drawings they wanted. I found these photos on the 1000 Drawings Facebook page of my umbrella ladies with a couple of buyers with stickers at the ready...steady...sold! 

I recognise the girls in the middle photo on the left as two that I sketched - next time I'll take an 'official' photographer with us or a portable scanner - do you get such a thing?

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:

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.

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!



Jacaranda Series

This concludes - for this year anyway - the jacaranda series of 4 little (25 x 25cm) oil paintings, that will be going onto the Arts & Crafts Fair at the end of this month, and with the weather we're having, had better be the last of new oil paintings for then - they will just never get dry in time! The flowers are falling like rain, too, and new green leaves sprouting. Soon the pods will fall, and then the tiny stalks, then the leaves and then the long stalks... it never ends with jacarandas - as we know too well, because some clever built our house's swimming pool right underneath one - a constant slog to keep it clean!

This is the opposite side of the koppie from which I painted the view of little Melville houses - this looks over the suburb of Emmarentia. Someone had considerately blasted a hole in the rock to begin work on their driveway, so that I could get a glimpse of the North-facing side - these houses have a wonderful view, which on a clear day must go all the way to the Magaliesburg.
Coming in on a wing and a prayer,

Look below there's our field over there.

Though there's one motor gone

We will still carry on,

Coming in on a wing and a prayer.

Jacarandas in oil

I hope you aren't very tired of these blossoms - I've been trying them in oils on small 25x25cm masonite panels, primed with gesso. I was thinking that they might go down well with the locals (at the Art & Craft Fair) who would be familiar with these scenes, as well as giving me some much needed practise in landscape painting. That bright pink bit is a bougainvillea.

I once had lessons with a teacher who thought that too much jacaranda colour in a painting would be a bit sickening - she may have been right! At least it's a small painting...

New Camera

Father Christmas aka Santa Clause brought me an early present of a brand new, zjooshy little Canon Ixus camera, after being a bit grumpy about me breaking my last one (Thank you Santa xx!). So I took these to show you I'm not making this up about the jacarandas in our much aligned city. I read that a famous food/travel writer/chef whose name escapes me, wrote in his South African tour book, "Johannesburg is hot, very very hot, Johannesburg is not, very very not"! So this is to show that it is, actually, sometimes! We've had a huge storm since I took these, so already they're looking a bit sparser.
I'm trying to paint some more small oils, with these as a subject, still for the Arts & Crafts Fair, but nothing I really wish to share with anyone just yet...

Painting the Town Purple

Some more jacaranda sketches while they last... after this Jozie will be green, green, green...I did a little pencil sketch and added the colour later - not ideal - and that pillar is so skew!
A magnificent indigenous 'umbrella tree' acacia sharing sky with an alien invader - we have the world's biggest man-made urban forest (I think I've mentioned that before) - mostly exotics
As commented on in the previous post, the jacaranda flowers strewn on the road pop pop pop as car tyres drive over them - but you have to go slowly and have your window open to hear them.

Jacaranda Time

A purple flush is creeping over Johannesburg... the jacarandas are coming into bloom and our notorious city is transformed into a thing of beauty and a joy for October into November... Since the demise of my camera (only yesterday - it feels like a week!) I've been toting my bag full of sketching tricks around, and bravely parking around the streets to draw. This nervous one below was the first - on my way to fetch my son from school in Northcliff, a gorgeous hilly foresty old suburb full of resplendently lush gardens. None of which you can tell from this sketch
The Pilot fineliner I used bled far too much into the watercolours, and the distant view melded into the foreground
This morning I parked on a Melville street and drew the (top) view towards the city, with water-soluble pencil, which worked better - then stopped in at our prettiest little church to spend a quiet hour in the garden - well, I would have to look up more superlatives - it is just bursting with colour, light, life and abundance. It was planted and nurtured by my friend, our now-retired pastor's wife, Wendy, and assistant gardener and verger, Joshua - a haven of peace and beauty to all who enter or walk past. This is just a little bit - I'll have to go back to do more.

Grey loeries

Some doodles from my layout pad - thin paper that I have no inhibitions about messing up on and can run riot with strange thoughts and ideas! I don't know why the ugly laughing mouth but the birds are the comical grey loeries that were bobbing around the newly budding jacaranda tree in our garden. They are also known as kwê-voëls (Afrikaans) or Go-away birds due to the noise they make... g'wayyy or kwê... In the bush, their natural habitat they actually seem to warn herds of buck about predators approaching, but here in our suburban garden, they taunt our hapless dog when he wanders out into their domain. How he would love to fly...