Kalahari Bookshop

The Kalahari Bookshop in Orange Grove is a cavern of delights for anyone who would take the time to sift through its groaning shelves, boxes and bookcases to find their particular brand of fascination (or if you're in a hurry, ask the knowledgeable owner Richard for help). I gladly accepted an invitation, along with a few friends, to join artist Tim Quirke in this tucked-away shop's day off - a Monday - to draw in this stacked to the ceiling space. 

Tim was working on a painting, and chatting to us about his methods and approach while the rest of us sketched, as we do, recording the moment in this nostalgic corner of Johannesburg. It was really hard to keep my mind on my sketch when titles that lined my childhood bookshelves kept catching my eye and drawing me to them with squeals of recognition.

After a morning chatting about art, by lunchtime we'd agreed to return over the next few Mondays to continue drawing and painting and learning from Tim the much he has to teach us. So that's what I've been doing over the last three weeks, instead of straightening the house after the weekend, laundry and keeping up with emails and blogging (and Inktober, more of which later), it's been pure indulgence in the world of tone, pattern and observation, which of course is all good!

The sketches below are studies of shape, flow, volume, light and dark, pattern, trying to make sense of the jigsaw of shapes. Hand-toned paper helps to convey something of the feel of the shop and its vintage, well-loved contents as a base for painting on later. While in theory I know of this approach to composition - notan, grouping of lights and darks to form passages - I'm very happy to feel I'm at last starting to figure out, with guidance, how to do it in a real situation...something that's mostly escaped me up to now.

To add to the alchemy, Richard's assistant Arthur kindly sits for us - he could possibly have stepped straight out of one of the books towering over us.
Next on this final (I think!) version, more light and dark passages following the studies above it, and some colour - I'll keep you posted, eventually!

10x10 Workshop 6: Watching, waiting, walking - People of Gandhi Square

I'm finally getting down to a report of the second workshop I presented in the series to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Urban Sketchers, on the 29th of April. (I missed out on workshops 3, 4 and 5 presented by Anni Wakerley and Lisa Martens, having been away from Joburg).

Photo by Leonora Venter

My focus was on sketching the people, and Gandhi Square being a main bus terminal in the city, was hoping for fairly stationary subjects waiting or slowly moving around there. We met at Joziburg Lane, which is in easy walking distance of Gandhi Square. Once again we warmed up with quick portraits of each other, but this time doing 'blind contour' drawings without looking down at the page - a little cheating went on but it produced lots of laughter and surprising, lively results.

Photo by Leonora Venter

After a short explanation and demo of 'contact points' and relating sections of the face or figure to each other and to the background - which in this case was to be minimal - and encouragement to just go for it - not to worry about results but to enjoy letting loose with line, we set off down to the square.




Of course such a large expanse of public space is overwhelming and intimidating to begin with, but it's surprising how quickly one feels right at home, once you've chosen a viewpoint and a perch, and concentrating on the task at hand helps to push curious onlookers into soft focus.

Photographs by Liesl Percy Lancaster of House of Lancaster 

 I was thrilled with the results (not all shown here) and varied attempts to capture figures who really never do stay still for more than a second or two. The act of looking hard and trying to put down some essence of them incrementally improves the ability to do so, most especially when you do it regularly and don't let the efforts of the previous day grow dim in the conscious and muscle memory. As I try to remind myself!

Here are are images from my handout booklet for the session. It covers rather a wide range of figure-sketching tips and approaches as my group consisted of a large range of sketching experience and skills.

 We also took the opportunity to record Urban Sketchers Johannesburg's happy 10th birthday message to Gabi Campanario and USk at this gathering, which was shown to him as a big surprise and tribute at the Symposium in Chicago in July. We're at 1:22 minutes in...

10x10 Workshops 1 & 2: Tablescapes & Conversations; and Histories, Relics & Collections of Sketches

We had the first of our series of 10x10 workshops on Saturday here in Johannesburg, joining the celebrations around the world of the 10th anniversary of Urban Sketchers. I started off the three 'Little Stories' classes in the pleasant and relaxed setting of the Second Cup restaurant, with simple concepts of shape, space, focus and drawing faces. Quite a lot to get through... I knew some of our participants hadn't sketched at all, or not for a long time, but wanted there to be enough to work on for the regular sketchers to build onto their skills.

This was my handout booklet to remind everyone what we covered - ellipses, basic shapes, ways to create an illusion of space and focus, and faces - pointing to artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Daumier - and USker Melanie Reim - for expression and character.

To try and get over inhibitions about sketching their companions, we had a quick 'Portrait Party' with one side of the table sketching the other, with a timer on for just two minutes, and then swopping over for revenge! 

 It was satisfying, and a relief - nobody seemed bored or intimidated - to see the concentration around the table as everyone came to grips with getting all the elements in fore- middle- and background, onto a page.

I did a quick demo of making loose watercolour shapes and then drawing over them with line, using the flowers on the table, and suddenly we had a lot of flower studies in between the tablescapes, but they made for a colourful final display. The Urban Sketchers Johannesburg rubber stamp caused a lot of excitement, the highlight ,apparently, for some!

And it was over...a super group of enthusiastic partakers and really wonderful results... all my prepping and unnecessary worrying worthwhile, thanks everyone!

Histories, Relics & Collections of Sketches

Our second workshop was held on Wednesday - yesterday - at Lindfield House, a Victorian home and museum, led by excellent regular Joburg Sketcher Leonora Venter.

The session started with a tour of the many rooms of the museum by its curator and co-founder Katharine Love - her grandmother and mother started the collection and she has maintained and built on it. She is a fount of knowledge of Victorian customs and antiquities, but we'll have to go another time to hear all the stories, there was sketching to be done..

After the sketchers had selected which items interested them and they wanted to feature, Leonora gave an explanation and demo of the importance of making thumbnails to plan your page, trying different alternatives and deciding which would be the best one for your chosen subject matter.

Once everyone had made their thumbnails, they planned out a full or double page spread with light pencil shapes. Leonora then explained how to work out the boundaries of each object with light 'markers' and to measure ratios, proportions and angles within these shapes, working from bigger to smaller, and looking at positive and negative shapes.

Then came the work - and fun - of filling in the details and building up contrast using darker pencil lines, pen or wash, before going on to the other drawings in their 'collection', adding text if they wanted to and had time. There are so many Victorian gadgets, curiosities, furnishings and objets d'art in this amazing old house it would take a lifetime to sketch them all.

Leonora's lovely demonstration sketch of her collected items on a practice run a few weeks before - and the sketchbook display on the lawn afterwards.

Poplars and Pétanque

 Well, a very Happy Not-so-New Year to everybody... I have badly neglected my blog as I've become slightly enamoured with Instagram (it's so quick, and instant!) as well as really busy with the usual end-of-year festivities and making plans for the series of 10 years x 10 classes Urban Sketching workshops that we in Joburg have decided to take part in. (If anyone reading this is interested in signing up, click on the link and do it. We start our classes on the 25 March and spaces are limited...you can also email me at the address in my sidebar). And we made another trip to Franschhoek, where I managed to do quite a lot of sketching while my husband, Bruce, was working hard.

It was blissful to do some relaxed watercolouring from the shady stoop of one of the beautiful Forest Cottages that we stayed in at La Cotte Farm. Gardeners were taking a lunch break, with ubiquitous cellphones, from digging out undergrowth from the poplar grove on a hot, hot day.

On the right, done earlier in Johannesburg, a strongly back-lit man sketched at the airport.

On Saturday mornings in summer, Franschhoek has its local market with food, wine, music, lots of stalls to browse and a regular Boules match, just as in real France. A vintageTriumph pulled right up to the cleared patch where the game takes place and a very handsome, cool guy (far right), with two young friends, got out and joined the game. Every now and then an oblivious person strolled across the court, taken with good humour by the otherwise serious pétanque players.

One of the boules participants got stranded on the recto side of a double-page spread - from our parked car the next day I filled the empty space (I was worried I'd run out of pages) with figures outside Pick'n Pay supermarket where someone was selling boerewors (farmer's sausage) rolls at a great rate - hardly any time to sketch his customers so fast was he.

Supper one evening, again, at the Station Pub, where I've sketched before and am now warmly welcomed by the two waitresses I drew, whenever they see me (with good, reasonable food and just down the road, we go quite often - plus, as I've said, Bruce's grandfather was Stationmaster there about a century ago, so we feel quite at home!) This visit had a lively, noisy crowd that I could have sketched all night without them noticing. Revellers coming and going and the two on the right engrossed in long and earnest conversation.

Lastly, a very quick sketch of one of the angel cleaning ladies who come in while you pop out and whip around your cottage, leaving it sparkling for you to come back to and start all your eating, drinking and messing up again. I could get used to that!

Finishing things

Over the last few months, on and off, I've been spending time in the studio determined to finish a whole bunch of half-done paintings - for better or for worse!  

These you may (or well may not) recognise from a previous post on Greg Kerr's Objets Trouvé workshop in 2014. Below are some of the stages these 60 x 60 cm paintings have gone through, some rather tortuously, via a series of processes. Splashing, rolling and printing paint onto the canvases with an underlying prepared motif  - mine our birdbath - which had to consist of organic and geometric forms. Interventions followed of adding textures, patterns and elements - some prescribed by Greg (each painting had an element taken from someone else in the class's paintings, to explain some strange additions... the crystal, the water tower, the child swimming, the sardine tin) as we worked through the course, some added tentatively or recklessly by me as I eventually took the plunge and tried to leave dependency on the teacher behind me.

Often I wished I could backtrack to a previous stage of simplicity or clarity, and in the one with the child swimming (I changed my classmate's child into my daughter) I was at the point of scrapping the whole thing but decided that more might be more and carried on adding flowers and fishes and glazes... it may still be scrapped...or cropped down to just the little girl swimming...or I could add the kitchen sink...

With changes and a move from Joburg sometime in the not too distant future, I have to finish and clear out so much stuff I don't know where to start. Painting is the relatively easy bit, I have to get them out of here!

Connecting

I said I'd post about a lovely painting (long) weekend that I took some time out from my big job for. It was a three day workshop by favourite teacher/artist Hermine Spies Coleman whose lessons and workshops I've attended on and off for 25 years or more (my husband asks if I haven't yet qualified every time I sign up for another one!) 

They are always sure to engender fresh thinking, new methods or as in this case, renewal or revival of the ancient process of connecting. With all the ways we have of communicating nowadays, you'd think we'd have it taped, but the connections seem ever more fleeting, tenuous and shallow the more channels we have to do it in. So it was with a feeling of increasing release from the tension of frantic drawing and internet FOMO that I entered into the gentle rhythm of the exercises briefly described here. 

On day one we started by 'conversing' in drawings, doodles or paintings with another anonymous workshop participant. The interactions were quite amazing, some harmonic and sensitive, others fairly combative  - most of the latter turned out in the discussions afterwards to be misunderstandings of what one or other artist meant, and were usually not criticisms at all as was sometimes perceived. How touchy we can be without reason, all in our own heads! In the top one, I did the first and third small paintings, Judy responded with the second and fourth, in the other one I replied to Paula's beginning and so on.

That afternoon we were each to view a chosen image, or the room in front of us as I did, through a glass of water and paint or draw it, keeping in mind an artist that we'd looked up and researched beforehand. Mine was Diebenkorn, not that you'd know that by looking at my painting, but it certainly helped me to simplify shapes, choose colours and add slivers of hues between shapes. 

The second day was my favourite. We took whichever drawing or painting tools we wanted out into the garden or through the back gate of our hostess Bev's home where there was a river and a fairly wild area - in the middle of built up Hyde Park! We were simply to sit there, feel, look, listen and absorb nature, and if we felt like it, allow our pencils or brushes to make marks or move across the paper in response. Once I'd found my spot, it felt supremely calming to feel no pressure to perform, or render the scenes around me accurately, or at all. I started noticing the twigs, leaves, feathers and other ephemera around my feet and they seemed almost to be messages or strange writings that might be deciphered. I started drawing them in pencil but found outlining them too cumbersome, so switched to a big brush and followed their shapes in watercolour. Presently the shadows falling on my paper seemed to nudge for my attention and I picked up some blue wash and followed those around for a while - looked up and saw some tiny lanterns draped around my head (gooseberry cases? delicately dried in random trails). I eventually became aware that I was about the only one still out there and reluctantly packed up to join the others.

We carried on painting inside, rounding up or finishing off, with a suggestion that we add something of ourselves into our work. I only did this a few days later after I'd thought and wondered what trace of myself I may have left behind on that landscape, deciding that it was probably strands of my very fine wispy hair - usually a cause of some distress! I dropped a few collected from my comb into a puddle of watercolour and let it dry... I don't know if this is a 'result', or a painting even worth showing, but it was a deeply grounding experience with the world, nature and dare I say, myself...

That afternoon we watched an engrossing, enchanting video of an artist who totally immerses himself in the landscape and his responses to it. If you haven't come across Land artist Andy Goldsworthy, do take six minutes or three hours to meet him and his beautiful work.

On the third and last day, we started where we were supposed to begin but didn't - by introducing ourselves and a short summing up of our art/history. I think because of the previous two days of deep work, much more came bubbling forth than would otherwise have done, and it turned out to be quite a moving exchange. Our final paintings were addressed to a particular person from our past or present - I rather disappointingly reverted to being quite literal (my family will know who I'm talking to here) - it isn't finished but I think I'll attempt this again. As Hermine quotes from Marc Chagall: "If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing." 

Exhibition of student's work

Hi - sorry about another long absence - I've been paddling as fast and as diligently as I can to help make this exhibition happen this weekend. Somehow or other I got to be coordinator-in-chief in spite of the almost catatonic state I get into when in administrative pressure roles.
Amazingly enough, I think we're on track and all will appear as planned on Saturday. It is, as you can see, an exhibition of student's work done in, or as a result of Greg Kerr's painting courses and has lots of interesting, unusual and provocative pieces. The image on the invitation is by Tracy Witelson, artist and art teacher, and assistant to Greg when he is teaching in Johannesburg, from The Dinner Party programme that I participated in 2013. I'll have two or three paintings on from this year's Objets Trouvès course (which I still have to show the end results of here, sometime).

If anyone who sees this is in Joburg this weekend, please come along, I'd love to meet you!

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.