And a Grey Lourie in a Plum Tree

A day late for this Johannesburg version of a Christmas tree, but hoping all who visit here had a very happy day, if you celebrated - and peace and goodwill to all!

Not a pear tree with a partridge, but the greengage tree outside my studio, which was vibrating a couple of weeks ago with all kinds of birds gorging and feasting on the not-quite-ripe-yet fruit. We still have pots of jam from last year's crop so I let them get on with it and spent a happy couple of hours watching and sketching them... The thrush thinking he's lord of the manor and trying to chase everyone else off, the barbets bright and fierce looking but quite wary of the other birds and of eyes peeping at them through the window; the little grey mousebirds with raggedy tails and punk hairdos come in cheeky flocks; my favourite bulbuls (they make such sweet, clear calls to each other, "what's for tea Gregory?") and the grey louries  - or Go-away bird - one semi-tame who comes and squawks at me outside the kitchen if there's nothing to eat and to bring out some paw-paw please.

I never used to be much into birds, it was what my mom, aunts and gran did. At last I'm mature enough to appreciate the small, precious things, some positives to these years passing ever faster by!

Spring in Black & White

 We were down in Franschhoek again last week, mon mari (a little French to suit the location) very busy with meetings, so I had plenty of time to chill - and there is no better place to do that - reading books, drawing and just gazing at the amazing scenery. The house we stayed in has a number of beautiful old black and white drawings and prints of trees in it and I was inspired to try using just pen and ink (my Lamy pen with a fine nib, and Noodlers black ink) to sketch in spite of the seductive brilliant greens just beginning to sprout from every dry branch and vine.

A pair of Egyptian geese had produced a family on the pond outside the house - last time my husband was here there were seven goslings, now reduced to three with a sighting of a rooikat (caracul or lynx) with a little feathered body clamped in its jaws reported! I sketched the survivors grazing on the lawn - their ruthless parents were now dive-bombing them to chase them off the premises - oh to be a bird!

I did try one little watercolour sketch of some indigenous watsonias against the fields, trees and mountains but my sketchbook paper and clumsy waterbrush conspired against the beauty I was trying to portray (well that's my excuse anyway).

A Bunch of Sketches & Visitors

 Yikes - it's April, and autumn already, and I've been so busy sketching and painting and thinking about what I want to/need to/have to do - posting it all has taken a back seat. To think I once started blogging to try and motivate myself to draw more... well, something's working at the moment!

We've had a couple of visits lately from sketchers from other parts of the country and the world. Ex-Joburg Sketcher Barbara Moore came up recently from her new home in Simon's Town in the Cape, and three of us had a relaxed morning catching up and sketching on a beautiful clear autumn day at Zoo Lake.

An icecream man pondering the lake with a beaded dragonfly mobile behind him

Waitrons and a mirrored angel - over cappucinos at Moyo restaurant 

A couple of weeks before that French urban sketcher Michel Davinroy was in town. He had been sketching prolifically on his own, but joined us at a Dance Umbrella rehearsal at the Market Theatre for the difficult challenge of capturing the unpredictable movements of contemporary dancers, mostly in the dark!

And yesterday, we arranged a mid-week sketching session in the nearby suburb of Melville to meet Brighton, England resident and world traveller Fiver Löcker.

It's exciting that we are so much "on the map" that sketchers from around the world are starting to seek us out to draw together, and enrich us all with their stories, sketches and enthusiasm! 

Car guards and basket ladies outside the Golf Tearoom in Melville

Fiver sketching on her iPad in the eclectic clutter of Antz café, Melville

Looking back

What a year, what a sketching, painting, writing, thinking, planning, travelling year! It may not have looked like it to you here, as I didn't quite keep up reporting on it all but when I look back... whew...
It was the year of:
  The incredible Lisbon Symposium
  The Postcard from my Walk exchange

The Art of Urban Sketching book - due to be launched world-wide in February, and in which Johannesburg, and I feature!

  The Dark Cloud - a fully-packed year long painting course

  A Don Andrews workshop

  Giving my own first workshops - first a sketching one here at home to practice for the symposium, and after much needless anxiety, the 'Urban Portraits' in Lisbon

  Trips all in a row to Zambia, Portugal and France

  The flourishing of the Joburg Sketchers group, which has gathered lots more participants and is in need of more efficient organisation and - dare I whisper it - another blog

While many would have taken all this in their stride and hardly blinked at all this activity, I have to admit to feeling wrung out towards the end of 2011. All the new experiences, commitments and schedules so different from my normal laid-back and pretty secluded lifestyle were a shock to my introverted system - happy and exciting, but still a shock. Keeping up my own postings, and with everybody elses on the art blogs, Flickr, Urban Sketchers and Facebook just got too much and I apologise again to everyone I neglected.

Looking back at the year in pictures from the postcard project is very satisfying. A record of the seasons turning in Joburg (apart from one done on holiday in Zambia), memories of who I was sketching for, when and where - after all the insecurities that we all seemed to share about producing cards 'good enough' to send - I approach the end of it with mixed feelings. The eagerly awaited postcards plopping through the letterbox took forever to arrive, while time to make another one to send, seemed to come round as soon as the last one was stamped and sent off. With three to go, I've stumbled and fallen behind with this too, but will catch up soon and show you my wonderful collection of cards from a lovely bunch of artists and friends from Sketchercise. In the meantime you can follow them all arriving to and from around the world here at Postcards from My Walk.
I'll be back with wishes for the New Year!

Happy Christmas!

 On another jacaranda-painting expedition a few weeks ago with our sketching group, I ended the session with a couple of sketches of  the thousands of fallen bougainvillea blossoms at my feet. I found the brush shaped petals and forms so enjoyable to paint, even roughly and quickly as I did them then (below), that I collected a hatful to take home. Yesterday I got to spend another happy hour or so painting them, now dried, more carefully, but still trying to keep them carefree. I think they'll do to wish every one of you a wonderful, joyous and peaceful festive season, however you celebrate it, wherever you are.

Spring Day in the South

Spring has arrived right on cue - our long (to me, *Cathy ;-) cold winter has morphed into warm, balmy, fragrant, birds-and-bees, blossoms and lime-green trees miracle once more. I haven't been here for a whole week again, as life got busy and some more work arrived, but I had to give a nod to the season that is bursting out all around and sketch in watercolours these freesias that have obligingly popped up in my garden, though I'm sure they were planted a few years ago.
I hope whether you're entering Spring or Autumn, that you can get out and enjoy the changes.

Cathy's comment in a previous post: *However, I must tell you I disagree on the "long" winter we've had... for us europeans expats your south african winters are so amazingly short compared to ours in Europe!!! But it's only a matter of point of view!! I entirely agree on the "cold" bit though - even as a European!!!

Rock pigeon tree

We are having stirrings of Spring at last, after a long, relentlessly cold winter. One of the first signs is when the ash trees that have been planted all along our street pop out their little pom-poms of yellowy green fluff, and the indigenous rock pigeons descend from their rocks (I presume) and come to feast on what is apparently their favourite food. In the early mornings and evenings these branches that lean over into our garden from the pavement are crawling with the grey, black and white spotted birds, until some rude noisy dog or person frightens them away. I'm not sure why they disappear during the day, but it may have to do with the bees that take over as the sun rises - the whole tree starts humming!
I drew these ones from my kitchen window where they couldn't see me watching them at fairly close quarters - I had to put their bright yellow beaks, eyes and feet in, but it makes them look a bit like cartoon birds. I used water-soluble graphite, watercolour, gouache and 2B pencil to try and get all the features of bird and tree, and didn't really succeed at all - more practice required!

This morning I went to an art book launch in town and sketched a little bit - you can see it over on Urban Sketchers if you will...

Autumn Break

Whee! Finished with the commissioned illustrations for now, and having emailed them off this morning, I fairly dashed down the road to Emmarentia Dam where the clear autumn sunshine and the ducks were calling. After weeks of careful black lines and digital colouring it was so good to dip a brush into real watercolour and splash it onto real paper!
I see now that the waterline is none too straight and the water itself rather murky and unsatisfactory. Lots of room for improvement, but it was a lovely hour or so, and I was glad to catch some of the autumn colours and get away from the computer.
I apologise for not doing much commenting lately (though I have been checking out most of my favourite blogs over breakfast or tea) - after hours on end on the 'pooter and with eyes, neck and shoulders screaming for mercy, I just put it on hold for a while. But thank you to all my visitors here for dropping by and taking the time to leave comments - it is as always very much appreciated. I should be back in the blogging saddle again soon!

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.

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.

Up the Garden Path

You may think this is a very busy painting, and you'd be right, it is... but it's a very very busy bit of garden. I fit in the sweetpeas, roses, daisies, lavenders, spinach (yes!), alstroemeria, ivy, agapanthus and icanthus, but couldn't squeeze in the plumbago, lemon drops, anenomes and fuschias and one or two more things I can't think of...
I am not a very good gardener, but someone who lived in this house in years gone by certainly was. She, or he, planted a structure of shrubs and perennials and herbs that come up and blossom year after year, season in and season out, with little need for any (not very green-fingered) ministrations from me. For years after we moved into this house I was too insecure to change anything at all, from what looked like sheer expertise - except for alongside the little front garden path - I started sticking in a couple of bulbs, and that cutting, and a slip of this and a friend's gift of that, and suddenly, this spring, I looked at it, and thought - this is my bit of garden! Messy and haphazard and overplanted as it is, it is no more the intimidating bygone garden guru's garden path - it feels like home.

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow...

...with a little sprig of jasmine. These flowers emerge from their buds a rich purple, then fade to a paler mauve and finally to pure white, hence their name 'Yesterday, today and tomorrow' - quite a mouthful! I wish I could paint the scents of these, and the jasmine and sweetpeas and wisteria that are billowing forth around the city - for a while, Joburg smells quite heavenly.
It's a good day to post this little study - Spring, new life and a precious new baby grand (or is it great?)-nephew in London, born just the day before the anniversary of his grandmother, our eldest sister's, passing away 7 years ago. A time of joy and celebration to replace a time of loss. Welcome little fellow (we don't know his name yet)!!
I've just looked up the proper name - brunfelsia pausiflora - does this grow in other places in such abundance? I associate it so much with Johannesburg - when I first came here as a 22 year old I had one outside my new bedroom window in a communal house, and it smelled fantastic, but I missed home - the Fairest Cape, so badly!

Return of the Weavers

I finally finished the right hand side of these sketch journal pages yesterday - I blogged about the left page in November last year, and when I noticed the little yellow birds back, busily darting around the garden and little green globes starting to form at the ends of bare branches, knew it was time to get this double page done. As Gillian (good and loyal sister) noticed in her comment on 'Walking the Talk again', things are coming around for the second time... which means... tomorrow is this blog's first birthday! I promise not to rehash last year and cover the same subjects all again, but the Walk, and the Weavers alerted me to the fact that I've gone full circle and kept this going for a whole year - wow! I'm trying to think up an appropriate celebratory subject to paint or sketch for tomorrow, and some sage words to impart, but really, I'm just quite chuffed!

Early anenomes

It's early July and already spring anenomes are blooming - these are some rather raggedy ones that I picked just before they lose their petals. A daffodil has also poked it's head up out of a pot, and the azaleas are almost over... all rather worrying, much as I appreciate the splashes of colour in the middle of winter. I'd rather the seasons kept to their more predictable, reassuring cycle and Spring arrived when it's expected.

Honeysuckle Struggles

We've had an unexpected and very welcome flurry of lovely family visiting so I haven't managed to keep up with posting, not being a great multi-tasker. But I had started trying to paint the Golden Shower honeysuckle creeper that pours over our ramshackle old pergola and makes it look splendiferous in spring and autumn. I was really struggling with portraying the myriad sprays of blossoms, and really wanted to show my best bit of how they drop off their bracts and hang from thin little threads like teardrop earrings, and was getting so caught up in those intricacies that I forgot about the big blank wall below. I have really done a big 'cheat' and Photopainted out a badly-drawn chair that I plonked in the middle, and actually think I'll have to start this all over again and paint the dog before I paint the fleas, a post I very timeously found on Jana Bouc's blog just when I was starting to
gnaw my knuckles in frustration.

I thought it would be simpler to just paint one flower-bract, but still managed to run out of room at the bottom to fit in the teardrops, so will have to do this one all over again too. I think I'll have to go shopping for some pure orange watercolour paint too as my mixtures of Yellow Gamboge, Cadmium Red Light and Winsor Red just aren't quite capturing the radiance. I really want to get this corner of sunshine down to my satisfaction, as I have been thinking about doing it for so very long!
(I wouldn't have posted these until they were better, but it's been a while since my last post, and I thought I'd better put something on in case anyone was wondering where I'd got to.)

Autumn leaves and roses(again)

I have been watching the trees turn and drop their leaves for weeks now on my (almost) daily walk, and thinking I must come back with sketchbook and paints to try and catch the jewel-like colours in the morning light. I didn't though, and there are now just a few left clinging to the nearly bare branches. So I gathered some outside our front door and piled them into my studio, and finally got to paint them yesterday. I have to have two watercolour paintings on the go at a time, as I can't stand waiting for the paint to dry on one, unless there's another to carry on with.
I thought I had painted the last autumn rose, but as the trees release their final golden offerings of the season, there is a whole new flush of buds and blossoms overlooking the icy swimming pool. I made a 'value' pencil sketch out there, and took a photo, and picked a rose to bring back to my studio on the other side of the house, and tried to paint the scene both freely and with an eye to composition, value, rythym etc.
I feel I am making progress! It was jolly hard work for much of the day and I was exhausted afterwards, (plus we had an unruly night with the cat tossing a rat around the kitchen, frightening the dog and keeping us all awake!) but I want to keep it up today before my thoughts on how to go about it are scattered again like those autumn leaves...

Papercut

Here is the wedding banner I was working on in the blog below - the wedding was wonderful, moving, and had many of us there determinedly holding back wild joyous sobs, as it was the 'happy second beginning' after long terribly rough times for both the bride and the groom. And the sun shone! - the only day it has for weeks before and ever since. What a cool wet summer we're having... those weaver birds were mistaken when building their nests so low (see previous post).
Anyway, after all that cutting, I haven't started my Christmas shopping - and it's our eldest's 27th (gulp) birthday tomorrow, and the house has spiralled down into chaos, so if I don't post for a while and anyone wanders into this blog, I wish you a very happy Christmas, Chanukkah or whatever it is you're celebrating - and a renewal of all your creative energy for the New Year!

Seasons come and seasons go

Two pages from my sketch journal… 5 months ago when the colours in the garden were turning from heavy, thick green to all the autumnal shades. My nephew Tristan and his wife Anna had just had a baby boy in London. That seems only weeks ago, but the garden is already bursting out of its winter browns, baby Henry has moved to Australia with his mum, dad and big brother, and I have done very little painting and sketching in the meantime.
I am in awe of expert blogger Katherine Tyrell, who writes her informative and inspiring ‘Making a Mark’ blog so regularly, as well as keeping her many Squidoo lenses going AND doing what look like pretty intricate and time consuming coloured pencil paintings. It takes me hours just to read a couple of my favourite art blogs, keep up with some of the links she posts, post my irregular little contributions here and occasionally dash off a new sketch in my journal. This ‘Spring’ one was done in hasty and economical line one day – the 6th of September – and coloured some days later, peering at the scene from the window as I didn’t seem to have the time to go outside with my paints and do it properly – and only posted today, a week later (the pink blossoms have already fallen off). We’re all busy, but some people seem to just fit way more into their day than others.
I think for now, ‘A Sketch in Time’ has to be more about pictures than words – it takes me so long to compose a little bit of writing, I am definitely out of practice - but making more art is my main aim, so for the meantime that is where I’ll try and focus.