Kom Poppie!

At last the December holiday invaders have left us and it is High Summer. In other words, long lazy days, the plaintive trilling of the European starlings, the evening scent of the Milkwood tree. We’ve had unseasonal rain, even thunderstorms, and fierce fires sweeping around the nearby settlements of Betty’s and Pringle Bay. I never quite know what I’m supposed to be doing in January – scratching around the studio, flipping through an old journal, wilting in the heat. The best antidote to this lethargy is to get into the water in the nearby Kleinrivier estuary.

On a muggy afternoon, you wander into a low – colour monotone beachscape, with little to differentiate sky, water and sand. Against this very big abstract canvas, humans inject bright colour contrasts and darker tones. Our usual goal-driven behaviour is also somewhat nullified by the nautical scale of things – here we are, us innocuous Sapiens and our beloved canines, just being lateral for a change.

Next to the water, it is almost desolate one moment, the next all cameraderie and hail-fellow-well-met. Soon there was a robust young couple taking the waters with definite purpose. They plunged recklessly in, floating along on the ingoing current for a while before running back and repeating the cycle. For a moment it seemed as if the resolve of the male had faltered as he lurked behind.: Kom Poppie! cried the woman, in a tone that would not be defied.

Mnr en Mevrou Poppie reis Stanford toe ter water

A group of Eastern Europeans had gathered to watch the antics of Poppie and Popette, and it wasn’t long before they overcame their fears and were flinging themselves into the water with the same childlike abandon. It wasn’t cold, it wasn’t tepid, it was Just Right.

You know, there’s something about that oke there that rings a bell – ah, yes, is he not perhaps that man from Trinidad, as depicted by one Peter Doig in his enigmatic work called Pelican? Or am I just getting too lateral?

Down by the waterside

I’ve been going to nearby Grotto beach a lot lately. It is sometimes wind-swept and deserted, at others it’s the most chilled and joyous of places: children jumping into the sea, the good residents walking their dogs, the cheery cries of the beach volleyball teams. On a calm evening the waves lap in and there may even be a Southern Right whale lolling a few hundred metres out to sea. For a moment the vast and alien Atlantic seems benign, and the beach visitors serene and contemplative.

I often get to the beach, ready to draw, and think “mmm… nothing here,” but then something happens. Yesterday it was the arrival of those two girls, the only swimmers on the beach. They sat for a long time, deeply engaged. I had my subject. I quickly put down the figure on the right, followed by that large bounding dog. Then the left figure draped in the towel. Then the whale -watching boat and finally the dog on the left. The drawing is a gathering- together of small moments. Nothing stays still for long and it’s a test of speed and the ability to imprint what you’ve just seen – I mean what the hell do the legs of a running dog actually look like?

And then things got weird. Into view came two blokes with black plastic bags over their shoulders. They were scuffling through the bins looking for stuff to re-cycle. And they were wearing masks. Not covid masks, but scary Crazy -store type masks. Wha HA HA! they shouted at the girls, waving their arms about. Although some distance away, the bikini – clad ones quickly gathered up their stuff and scuttled off. Having gone through the bins and chased away the girls, the Masked Ones sat down on a bench and regarded the sea. And a huge black Raven, right on cue, descended onto one of the bins. A pure Twin Peaks moment – I’ve never seen that Raven on the beach before. But I know a performance artist when I see one, and I went over and had a chat to the lads. These okes, who are clearly on the outers, scrabbling for aluminium tins to put bread into their mouths, are still capable of existential jest. I would have loved to draw them, but there just wasn’t time. They might still find their way into a painting of Grotto beach.

Judge for a day

I got a call out of the blue from the South African Society of Artists asking if I’d be prepared to be one of the judges to select work for their annual exhibition. Of course I would. I was to report to the Rondebosch Boys Prep school on Sunday 6th August at 9.00am sharp. After reading the email describing my duties and obligations, I put on my judge face and headed for the Mother City.

The SASA has been around for more than 100 years, so they’ve had a bit of time to work out how to judge a competition. Three seated judges on one end, five people opposite to record the judge’s marks, and fifteen volunteers to present the work to the judges. Upon our tables there was a revolving wheel to signal our chosen score for each work. Also on the table were two energy bars, some sweets, a notepad and pen, some tissues and a small bottle of Panado. And a small blanket. It was cold in the Rondebosch Boys school hall.

There were 250 paintings to look at. That’s a lot and in the beginning its hard to figure out what the parameters are. One is gauging the work but also monitoring oneself: am I being too mean here? Did I just give that person a 9 because I just gave three fives in a row? Did I give that painting an 8 because it has a cat lying on a carpet, and like cats? Why am I marking the watercolours so high? Is it because lately I can’t do a decent watercolour and clearly these amateurs are better than me? I have no idea what marks the other judges are giving. The work keeps coming and eventually I’m running on autopilot, which is a good thing because in these matters you just have to trust your instincts.

As it happens, I’m reading the memoirs of one A S Hartrick, a forgotten English painter of the late 1900s. He belonged to the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. They got that great narcissist James Whistler in as President, of which he says ” The methods of Mussolini and the Fascists in a small way appear to have been tried out here thoroughly, long before we heard of them politically.” Indeed. Aesthetic matters are deeply subjective, and I’m wondering what the biases of the other two judges are, and if we’ll see eye to eye on what comes out on top.

After a home – baked lasagne for lunch, we got through to the final stage, where us judges were at last allowed to confer. The highly – marked work was up on the stage and now came the tricky final hierarchy bit.

It turns out to be easy. We quickly agreed on what was “commended,” “highly commended,” and which works were the winners in their categories. If the judges put their egos aside, a measure of objectivity is possible! I had feared that I may have needed a Panado or two after that relentless inward tide of work, but i left feeling uplifted. Not that far from us, there were taxi operators blocking roads and wielding AK47s. People are on the take, dying in the streets, putting the screws on each other in all sorts of ways. But here are the devoted painters voluntarily giving up their time in a collective effort to improve what they love to do

in Napier

I’m parking out on a stoep in Napier, doing a little sketch while I wait for my friend Ashley to appear. I strolled in, there was no -one around and it was all open. They’re very chilled in Napier.

I’m visiting my friend Ashley who bought this place on the main road last October. She’s done miracles with it, transforming it into B + B and an art studio. It’s called STOEP of course, and I realize this is something I’ve been missing since the Fordsburg days. It’s so lekker to be parking out on a North-facing stoep, watching the life of the town pass by below.

The truth is, I needed to get out of the house. The Cape winter isn’t being very kind this year, and I’m so gatvol of that cold breeze coming off the dreary Atlantic. Or it whistles down over the Kleinrivierberge, all the way from Sutherland. Aaaargh! Surprising though, how just a 40- minute drive through the wheatlands of the Overberg can set one right again.

The road curves through vast swathes of intense green farmland and there are interesting dirt options with names like Boskloof and Schietpad. I mean to explore them more thoroughly as an anti-depressant measure. And to paint of course. I’ve packed all the gear, but, with all the tea-drinking and stoep – sitting, I didn’t quite get there. But tomorrow’s another day….

Istanbul and Stellenbosch

“…her country, our country, but also nobody’s country, a myth of country in a constantly changing continuum of life and light that exceeds all countries.” – Alex Dodd

On a sunny Saturday morning I ventured over Sir Lowry’s pass and through the wasteland of Somerset West to Stellenbosch. Destination: The Ilse Schermers gallery in Dorp Street, somewhere behind that mountain there.

Ah, the Cape:  Big mountains, expansive views over the Atlantic, and… expansive, drab, treeless, dismal – looking squatter camps. Are there squatter camps around Istanbul, I wonder? I think of that ancient metropolis because the artist Diana Page lives there, and her poetically – titled show,  ‘Walking on a rim of light,” was about to open.  

Page has lived in the evocative city of light for the past 16 years, and the work is a selection from the past six or seven years. Stellenbosch feels Mediterranean today, and the work seems right at home here. A travelling show is a logistical nightmare – all those big heavy crates, expensive and difficult to move. Not to mention customs and god knows what other obstacles. Undaunted, Page found a guy to roll the canvases – and shipped them to her first port of call, the excellent Oliewenhuis museum in Bloemfontein. And now they’re in Stellies.

The artist and tickled -pink admirer

 You’d call this work abstract, no doubt about it, but actually we’re led in and out of a field where form coalesces and then dissipates again. There are glimpses of stuff we know: here, figures and buildings, there a cobbled lane, a face in a crowd. We’re aware of the calligraphy of the brush, its agitated or doubtful scratchings that lead us into gentle swathes of colour. It’s not about the topography or the specifics of place. It’s more to do with the global stuff, like light and its emotive effects. I had a little thought that yes, art – particularly abstract art – really is an international language.

Not content with one speaker to open the show, Page brought in two, both of them Phds. Outrageous! Talking about art is hard at the best of times, but Alex Dodd and Julia Martin did the business. They brought the gravitas with not a whiff of pretension.

Funny things, exhibition openings. Well – heeled folk mixing with bohemians, art – lovers, networking artists and some who’re really just there for the wine. I met some new people and caught up with some I hadn’t seen for a while. And then it was enough and I walked out into the bright mid -day sun. There is the smell of money in Stellenbosch these days. The streets are littered with Porsche Cayennes and Dylan Lewis sculptures. Pavement cafes abound, where the young and suntanned take their sparkling drinks. But the old Cape persists through these changes, a message from another, distant, country.

The show comes down on April 30, go have a look if you can.

Breakfast at Cands

Our thing on a Saturday morning – or any other day really – is to have a little breakfast at our favourite spot in Hermanus called Cands. Well, today is Human Rights Day, so that means breakfast, right? One street up from the main road, Cands gets tourists, but it is mainly us locals here today. We know good food (and good prices) when we see it. Outdoor tables overlook the pedestrian – friendly street and inside there’s a peaceful vine – covered courtyard. The dappled sunlight in there is just right for the old bones of our Lulu, who has the run of the place.

Today we’re having breakfast with young Emma, who astutely chooses a Vanilla milkshake and a toasted egg and cheese sarmie. After ordering, we nip around the corner with Lulu. We walk past a superb mural by local artist Jeandre Mariner. Tourists are posing in front of it and taking selfies – all part of the virtuous upward cycle of a small pothole – free town. My mate Owen is at his post, gathering bucks from parked cars. In theory, the parking attendant is supposed to ward off car thieves and the like but actually there’s none of that going on. I give Owen parking money because I enjoy his ebullient spirit and his sense of style. Today he wears new shades and a shark tooth necklace. He readily strikes a pose with Emma in front of another Mariner mural.

Back at Cands, our breakfast is delivered to us by the ever – cheerful Gary, who is sporting splendid new braids.

“But boys don’t wear braids ” says Emma.

“Oh, and why not?” replies Gary, gently erasing from her mind a gender sterotype.

I do a little drawing of Emma sipping her milkshake. She generously declares it “good, ” and underneath it she writes ” It is my human rights to drink a milkshake!”

Who can argue with that?

Skeef!

I’m in Cape Town, walking down Main Road, Rondebosch. Its 9am. I’m looking for some place to get something to eat and I have a back spasm.

The early morning drive from Hermanus to the airport didn’t really help, and neither did getting stuck in the traffic into the city. I catch a glimpse of some wasted old geezer in a window as I walk. Oh shit, that’s me shuffling along there.

After a while I shuffle into a place that offers a breakfast begel. I get a packet of Panado from the Checkers and settle down uncomfortably. The Panado helps and I continue on my mission, which is to get to the Italian Art Shop. I aim to get some Gum Arabic, for I have embarked on the strange mission of making my own watercolours. Despite that, I buy some marked – down Maimeri watercolours. They’re very good and are no longer being brought in. I also invest in a lovely Rosemary quill brush. Then, full of visions of swashbuckling watercolours issuing forth from the new brush, I head back to Hermanus to see my chiropractor.

That evening, sitting on the beach near the estuary, I give the new brush a bit of a turn. Still in pain and sitting weirdly. the little colour sketch is distinctly un – straight, the whole thing subsiding to the right. Ja nee, skeef back, skeef everything else.

The recent weeks haven’t been exactly prolific. A long niggling flu virus has afflicted our household and badly affected everything. I’m trying to organise and finish work for an end-of-year show. I think I’ve spotted a gap for all these watercolours that I’ve done over the past year or three. They need to be seen, and with a bit of wandering around the back roads of the Overberg, I can put together something meaningful. And these back roads need to be explored. Within a 50 kilometer radius of where we live, there are all sorts of undiscovered gems.

The Van der Stel pass – who knew?

So I get over the back spasm. I get over the niggling flu. I get on the road a bit and do some drawing. Then off to the airport again to fetch Cathy. Turns out she picked something up on the plane. Then I get it too. Another viral malady, all over again, like Groundhog Day or something out of Kafka. We just can’t get going. things are just adamantly SKEEF. There’s not much time left before the end of year crowds invade our town, bringing money to buy art. Am I going to make it or will the viral onslaught prove to be my undoing?

Watch this space….

O fok!

Turpentine and coastal air

People often ask me what kind of work I do as a painter. I usually just say I’m a landscape painter. Everyone has some notion of what that is, and indeed I do paint landscapes. But I also paint things that are renderings of ideas, and these two things, being a painter of the thing seen, and being a painter of the thing imagined, are two poles of my artistic life. I veer between them. I spent the first half of the year working out various “idea” paintings – and now I need to have a good look at the great outdoors again.

I’m at the water’s edge, and huge winter clouds hang moodily over Walker Bay. It’s late afternoon and the light is beautiful. As the sun goes lower, all sorts of pink and yellow hues will permeate sky and ocean, presenting immense and daunting possibilities for the humble painter.

I’ve been looking at stuff in Hermanus for well over a decade. I go most evenings and do a quick drawing or a watercolour, the trusty Africanis hound by my side. We have our favourite spots on the beach or along the cliff path.

These are sketchbooky things, and truth be told, we are nothing like Mr Monet, who laboured incessantly in the wind and rain, “clad like the men of the coast, covered in sweaters, boots, and wrapped in a hooded slicker, his easel tied down with ropes and stones.”

No, we often just park out in the cosy cabin of my 2006 Nissan X Trail. I can see plenty of stuff from there, thank you very much.

Hurry up dude, its time to go drawing!

But today I’m outside, on the fabulous Cliff Path, and I’m using oil paints, pretending to be a plein – air painter. (“en Plein air “- the French term denoting working outdoors. It just sounds arty .)

I set myself up and without too much scratching of the head, I get going. I have a piece of cardboard to paint on. That’s my way of overcoming the fear of the pristine canvas. Cardboard is actually a great surface to work on – ask Simon Stone. I meet a photographer called Leanne Stander and next thing she ‘s photographing the artist at work. Then a wandering Spanish bloke also has to take a pic. Why? Did he think he was seeing a great artist at work? Or did he perhaps think he had come across something rather quaint and antiquated, like a model T Ford ? Suddenly my quiet little Sunday afternoon oil-painting experiment is becoming a performance. Help! I’m under scrutiny!

Hero artist, or Model T Ford? (pic by Leanne Stander)

Soon, however, it’s just me staring towards Gansbaai, trying to figure out those shades of aquamarine in the rapidly-changing light.

The cloud on the horizon gets steadily closer, and I pull out a little 15 x 30 cm canvas panel, putting down some dashes of colour as the rain drifts in. Suddenly I’m having a true plein-air moment: wet paint all over the show, rain dripping from the brim of my hat, gathering together my stuff and scuttling for cover. It’s quite exhilarating, this fresh air business. I think I’ll be giving it another go.

The beautiful oil

We get hold of a tube of oil paint, squeeze it out, add a bit of turpentine to thin it out, and off we go, not thinking too much about what’s actually in that tube. You need two things to make paint: a finely ground coloured powder called pigment, and something to bind your pigment so that it sticks to your chosen surface and stays there. Over the centuries, artists tried a lot of gooey stuff and for a long time, egg yolk -called Tempera painting – was a popular binder.

But tempera is difficult to blend. It dries very quickly and in order to create volume, you have to put down shading in a lot of small strokes – kind of like cross hatching. You can’t gently blend tones from light to dark. Then in the early 1400s, some chaps in the Low Countries, mainly Jan Van Eyck , discovered that if you mixed oil into your paint it was a lot more flexible and luminous and there was a big leap:

sigh, look at her, all oily…

how shiny and 3D I am !

They experimented with a variety of oils – but in the end, linseed oil was the business. It is flexible, durable and importantly for us starving artist -types, affordable. You can get boiled and raw linseed oil at your hardware store, and the refined, pricier version for painting at the art shop. My love for the stuff started when I was a teen, curing my first cricket bat – it took many coatings of oil. The oil had a lovely aroma and made me think about walking onto the pitch, calmly surveying the enemy field, and then smacking a perfect cover drive like my hero Graeme Pollock.

the well -oiled bat

Eventually my bat was ready for action and I found myself in a real cricket match. I was somewhere in the middle order and our openers in the Jeppe under 13 b team had not fared well. My turn came, sooner than I thought it would. I fumblingly strapped on the leg pads and headed to the middle. The bowler gave me the evil eye and then walked back to his mark. And then he walked even further back. Crikey! He came charging in from miles out . I closed my eyes and put the bat in front of me. The ball glanced off the bat and shot away, all the way to boundary. Four runs! Alas, that was my finest moment. Three deliveries later I got bowled out. Not long afterwards, I was dropped from the team and frankly I didn’t mind. Now I had more time to work on my poster of Percy Sledge.

The only drawback to linseed oil is the same thing that made it popular in the first place – it dries slowly. Artists have tried a lot of ways of speeding up the drying, not all good. The answer for me was hidden in the covers of this book, published in 1949:

There, on page 105, is the secret: sun- thickened linseed oil.

You lay out your oil in a flat dish, about half a centimetre deep, and you cover it with a glass lid. It musn’t be sealed – you leave a small gap for air flow between dish and lid. You have to be careful that dust and stuff doesn’t get into the oil, and this is difficult when you’re leaving it in the sun for a week or more. No matter what you do, stuff finds its way in. You keep your eye on it and jostle it around a bit to prevent a film forming over the top. Once the oil has reached the consistency of honey and has several bugs in it, you’re ready to go.

after ten days in the wind-swept Cape

According to Doerner, “it dries with a certain gloss, and has been used for centuries as an excellent painting medium, by Rubens among others. It gives the colours an enamel- like character and permits, despite its viscidity, a great amount of technical freedom. Cennini (b1370 ) called it the best of oils.”

Linseed is also called flaxseed, and when cold- pressed (and definitely not left out in the sun,) you can add it to your diet. Yes people, its very good for you. Mahatma Gandhi knew that too, “whenever flaxseed becomes a regular item among the people, there will be better health,” he said.

And one last thing. Linoleum. You remember the dark brown linoleum we use to make linocuts? The main component of that sweet- smelling stuff is linseed and linseed oil too. Where would we be without the humble linseed?

The late, late show

The 18 -year -old cat is yeowling at the end of my bed again. I look at the clock: the dreadful hour of 3 am. I can’t get back to sleep, so I give in and hand him a little something to eat. Now everyone’s awake, and worse, Lulu wants to go outside. I can’t just let the dog out into the garden, we don’t have a fence. (Yes, you read that right. We live in South Africa and there isn’t a fence around our property.)

So now we’re on the street. It’s a little colder than it should be – the summer takes forever to get to the deep South. A faint yeowling from the rafters: Ravan the takeover cat is on the roof.

the alien has landed

I shine the torch down 6th street. Thirty metres away there’s another pair of cat eyes, they disappear as Lulu trots towards them. That’s Katerina’s cat, guarding his turf. It’s peak cat hour, obviously. A giant moon hangs low at the other end of the road. I never noticed it there before. It does that, the moon, it moves around unpredictably. We amble up towards 5th street. The mountain – our mountain, is immense and very black. The sky above the mountain is blueish grey, with a watercolour wash of Indigo in the deep heavens. Big slow marshmallow clouds overhead. I’ve always envied that poetic title Max Ernst gave to one of his paintings – “the phases of the night.” The night calls artists, of course, and I think of Whistler, Van Gogh and Ed Hopper.

I once heard a French person expounding on the French words “La Nuit,” how the phrase captures the resonant mystery of night. Indeed, but how about the Xhosa word “ubusuku”? Now that’s got a bit of soul in it.

The takeover cat has come down and joined us on our amble through the deserted suburban streets. Our little party – the geriatric cat, aging Lulu, and your aging artist have seen and sniffed enough for now. We shuffle back indoors for a little more sleep. In a couple of hour’s time I’ll hear the plaintive cry of the Diederik’s cuckoo and I’ll know its summer at last.

on a Joburg road

The only driving I’ve done for the past year of Covid restrictions is up and down the main road of the dorp of Hermanus, at a sedate 60km/h. Now I’m suddenly in traffic, and I need to shake this geriatric mode and get up to speed. Back when I worked in Fordsburg, Rosebank was about as far north as I ventured. But now I’m on this endless thing called Beyers Naude road (or the M5,) wending my way past shopping malls and car dealerships, dodging potholes and taxis.

It’s nondescriptland, a hodge-podge of familiar brands and flailing smaller enterprises. Middle America perhaps, except for a slew of orange-overalled men in orange hard hats at the intersections, handing out flyers for an insurance company. The main arterials to the north of Joburg are strangely interchangeable to me: the same featureless urban sprawl that eventually peters out in a squatter camp or a wedding venue, a scrapyard, a nursery of sorts. It occurs to me that I actually met Beyers Naude once, back in the 1980s. He was a dissident Afrikaner who’d fled the fold of the Broederbond and the grand Apartheid delusion. As a result, he’d been “banned,” which meant he was virtually under house arrest and visitors were restricted. We went to speak to him about a subversive project we were planning, and I have this fleeting image of old “Oom Bey” sitting in his garden in one of the suburbs near here, a calm and dignified presence despite the scrutiny of the “system.”

The road heads North West, and I’m aiming for Muldersdrift. On both sides of the road, the forest of suburbia spreads out forever. The streets are named after heroes of the Volk like Boer General Christian de Wet, and less heroic chaps like Jim Fouche (anyone remember him?) and John Vorster. Now I have another recollection: A National Party election rally in the 1970s, with the Prime Minister himself as the headline attraction. I had to see for myself, so there I stood, aged nineteen, at the back of a large marquee while BJ Vorster thundered on into the microphone. My mustachioed white compatriots roared in approval, but I thought the whole thing was totally uncool. Which is why I ended up in Oom Beyers’ camp, I suppose.

I see that some of the streets have been named after artists. The sculptors Anreith and Van Wouw are immortalised in the curbstones of Linden, and I think surely there must be a Pierneef Street. But there isn’t. Not far away though, there’s something called Pierneef Park. He had a whole suburb named after him! I’m keen to see what that looks like, but not today, so I get back onto Beyers. Crossing the NI western bypass, I glimpse the new corporate HQ of FNB/Wesbank, risen from the veld like some gleaming intergalactic starship of capitalism. Then more Afrikaner suburbia thinning out as we go, and then Lagos – like stuff, skirting the edges of the Zandspruit shackland. Minibus taxis gathered on the side of the road, makeshift workshops, street vendors braaing mielies. A universe of stuff to draw. Not a white face to be seen here, and not too many wearing the mask either.

Onward, past the Happy Island Waterworld, past the one-man hamburger hut, past the Khoi Empire. Finally, crossing over the highway to Pretoria, I get a sense of the open country. I turn off onto a small tarred road past the old Muldersdrift Clinic. There’s a curious mix of vegetation here – we’re just getting into “bushveld”, so there’s a hint of grassland with arbitrary aliens like poplars and pine trees. Mixed into that are what’s left of some distant plot -dweller’s schemes, the purpose now obscure.

A kilometre of small tar road and I’m at the gate of Watermark Farm, home of the writer and equestrian Anne Biccard. Once inside, there’s the reassuring sound of gravel crunching underwheel, and a wonderland of indigenous trees: paperbarks, acacias, fever trees. There’s a big sky overhead and huge cumulus clouds building for an afternoon storm. There’s just something about the Highveld in summer that speaks to me like nothing else. A quick cup of tea, and I’m reaching for my pencil and sketchpad…

The king of Stony Point

Stony Point, Betty’s Bay, that’s where you’ll find the African Penguin. I went there not so long ago to check up on them. Like Panda bears and Zebras, penguins are cute, in a cartoony way. They’re clearly awkward on land, and we have no idea how quick and mobile they are in the water, so we’re stuck with this cartoon of them. Cape Nature has constructed a long walkway along the edges of the colony, and as you and your fellow penguin – tourists enter the domain, you steadily lose the cartoon. For starters, they don’t interact with us: they’re just not interested in us. And then there’s the guano-smell of the colony; a very un-cartoony smell, the smell of something wild and other.

I’m not interested in you

I was there on a sunlit day in November, but there was a cold breeze coming off the vast Atlantic. Stony point is far South and as I strolled past the bleached boulders and the solitary darters, I felt like I might be getting to the edge of the known world. From the information boards I learnt that African Penguin numbers have declined over the last century from 3 million to around 36 000. So here it is again, the depressing story of Nature in the 21st century. They are running out of food, and needless to say, we’re the reason for that. We’re chowing their pilchards and anchovies. These are the hangers – on, the remnants of a crime nobody really noticed.

The king of Stony point

I knew a linocut was called for, one that depicts the penguin as a defiant and hardy critter. As it turns out, I was finishing my linocut when I heard Lewis Pugh being interviewed on Michelle Constant’s SAFM show. Perhaps Mr Pugh will be the shining knight the African Penguin desperately needs. The first and most important move to save these guys is to establish a no-take fishing zone within a 20km radius of a colony. That seems like a pretty simple thing to do, right? Lewis said he’d written several times to Minister of Environmental affairs Barbara Creecy, but has yet to receive a reply. Ag come on Minister, asseblief tog….

Lewis Pugh’s December 2nd article in the Daily Maverick:

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-12-01-african-penguins-are-heading-towards-extinction-heres-how-we-can-save-them/

Just knocking around

An autumn day in the Overberg. I’m off to Kleinmond and Betty’s Bay to draw, but, despite the sunlight, things are hazy and I decide instead to go inland. I take the road up the Hemel en Aarde Valley. We wind gently upwards past fabled wine estates. I have my sketching stuff with me, and of course the company of the intrepid Africanis, ears straight up, watching for baboons and guinea- fowl. At the top of the valley there’s a dirt road with a sign saying Karwyderskraal. I take a left there. I noodle on down the road, eating the dust of urgent Toyota bakkies. Where are they going in such a rush? They have business on those wine estates. Or maybe they’re Karwydering things. I take a right up a pine tree avenue, the De Bos dam down below. I’m seeing a lot of stuff, but its just not composing itself. Out of the car, there’s a chill wind, and I can’t get the car facing the right direction. I close the door on my thumb. I feel badly dressed, cranky, and out of sorts. I need new shoes. The clock is ticking.

Back on the dam wall, I pull up alongside a large SUV, and we peek over the edge. Two men and a woman. Swimmers, one in a wet suit and two soaking in the morning light. Snatches of talk drift up, and there are tales of Iron Men and other endurances. I confess, dear reader, that for a moment, I envy their youth and their strength.

After a while the woman comes up the embankment and she pats Lulu and tells me, by way of explanation, that they are Training. Three people in their productive prime whiling away a Tuesday morning sloshing around the De Bos dam. Training,eh? No wonder the economy’s gone to pot. Straightening my shoulders, I said to her “I am doing Aesthetic Research.” Nah, I didn’t say that. “I’m just knocking around” is what I told her.

We dawdle up the valley until we get to the Teslaarsdal road. At last, the dirt road I’m looking for! A kilometer down the road, I pull up and start a drawing. It is noon now and warming, and I’ve stopped the nonsense of looking for picturesque things to draw. There’s a craggy outcrop to my left, but I’m looking instead at some bland fields and a grey nondescript hill. After a while a car pulls up next to me, and dispenses a man and woman, who thank the driver for the lift. They wander off towards Teslaarsdal with nothing on the horizon. The man in the car next to me struggles for a while to start the engine, and I ignore him steadfastly. Eventually it splutters to life, and away he goes. It’s hot now and I need suntan lotion. I find some in the console of the car. It is cheap green allegedly zinc -based stuff targeted at surfers. Why did I buy it? I apply it first to the back of my neck, then to my arm. My forearm is now bright green and sticky as if dipped in nuclear slime. Yay!

A few kilometres towards Teslaarsdal I see the man and woman trundling along the road. I stop to give them a ride. “Muli bwanji!” I say as they get into the car. The Malawian greeting is met with great surprise and mirth. Perhaps its just my bad pronounciation. I drop them at a farm gate further on down the road. Eventually I get to the metropolis of Teslaarsdal. Nothing more, perhaps, than a gradual expansion of smallholdings and two new (and ugly) facebrick shops. It merits another visit but for now I have one more drawing to do, so we get back onto the dirt, trustfully following signposts that give no indication of distance.

I go on through the agricultural wasteland. It is difficult to think of it as anything else. Rather like the world evoked by Andrew Wyeth’s great painting ” Christina’s world,” except more so.

This is the world us bread -eaters have made. Scrubland – once the home of many small mammals and the raptors that lived off them –  makes way for wheat; our carb-craving knows no end. Outside of the odd sheep, there really is very little life here, although farmers are encouraging the blue cranes endemic to the area. And I saw a heron. And five egrets.

Its getting on, shadows are lengthening and the light yellowing. Despite these morbid thoughts, it looks beautiful. I stop the car on a hill and do my last drawing of the day, overlooking a cluster of bluegums and gentle hills marked through with giant scribbles and scrawls. And then its back around the Kleinrivier mountains to the suburban seaside.

 

The power of Walter Meyer

It was 1994, in Yeoville. Across from the Checkers in Raleigh road, there was an old railway coach that went as a diner. I was in there, having coffee with James Philips. It was noon. His hair was long and somewhat unkempt and he smelled of nicotine. He was excited. “Carl, this new shit we’re doing is radical, broer; horn arrangements, weird time signatures, complicated shit!” He was telling me about the new Lurchers’ cd they were recording. And he said ” I’ve got an amazing painting that we’re going to be putting on the cover of the cd. It’s by Walter Meyer. Have your heard of him? ” No I hadn’t.

The cd was called Sunny Skies, a caustic jab at the popular “Braaivleis, sunny skies and Chevrolet” adverts that had been aimed at the myopic white tribe in the 1980s. Meyer’s painting was of an eerily barren 70s East Rand-type house about to be swamped by the mother of all thunderstorms.

There was a rapport between James’ music and Walter’s painting . Here were two dissenting white men, each blessed with unique gifts in their own fields, calling the last round on the culture they grew up in. At Meyer’s first one man show in Joburg, at Ricky Burnett’s Newtown Gallery,  the Lurchers played live to mark the event. Not that Meyer needed the extra noise. His paintings – and there were a lot of them coming at you – were like a well- timed punch in the gut. This was the South African hinterland at the end of Apartheid : desolate small town houses, deserted main roads, broken farm buildings.  Things that we’d all seen were suddenly there in a way that was both familiar and utterly new. Meyer had a way of transforming the photographs he worked from. This was “realism,” but the brushwork – intense and absolutely assured – took the images well beyond the photograph. Here, in grungy downtown Joburg, was a major painter announcing his arrival.

Goedemoed, Kalahari,1995. Oil on canvas 48 x 58cm

 

Innovators see what everyone else sees but doesn’t really notice. They figure out how to paint it. A glare of light on the Karoo ground at noon, the relentless sun casting deep shadow. Nondescript railway sidings in the veld. How a few scraggly palms planted in hope come to signal despair. These subjects were a far cry from the concerns of traditional landscape painters. Meyer looked unsparingly on the mark of man on the landscape and what he saw was definitely not a Chevrolet commercial. In Pierneef, nature is mostly nurturing and benign: Man succeeds against the odds and a feelgood order prevails. There is nostalgia in both Meyer and Pierneef, but in Meyer there is little consolation. Instead, we sense loss, alienation and the downright strangeness of the world.

Jagersfontein, 1997, oil on canvas 84 x 100cm

Walter was a man for heat, arid vistas and big skies. He didn’t, like many of us, live in suburbia and make occasional forays into the platteland. He lived it. He also, to be sure, knew degrees of anguish – a man of few words, unable to keep off the booze, the hangover a constant companion. A mark of an artist must surely be his or her influence on their peers. Just as it is difficult to bypass Pierneef, the aspiring landscape painter should now address the work of Meyer. He was the kingpin in a moment of South African painting in which I would include such luminaries as Anton Karstel, Johan Louw, Kobus Kloppers and Clare Menck for starters. He will be missed. Hamba kahle, WM.

 

 

 

 

 

In black and white

I spent the first half of the year in fruitful quest of the landscape. Then I embarked on a bumbling attempt at house renovations, skewered by the Hermanus municipal plans department. I dabbled a bit with watercolours. There were pleasant afternoons spent thus, outdoors, in winter sunlight, looking at the cold Atlantic ocean. But I soon gave up on that too. Then I chanced upon a little box of vintage drawing nibs that I’d bought twenty years ago at Cornelissen and Son, the legendary London art supplies shop.

The delicate old nibs have arcane inscriptions on them, like Globe Pen, Birmingham,England, 5 , or C Brandauer and Co. Oriental Pen, No. 3 or Goode and Co, no 801, London. Used with Rowney Kandahar Indian Ink, these proved to be the thing I was looking for. Ink is emphatic and non-negotiable, no rubbing out. The mark is made, and there it is. Of course, the safe thing is to do it in pencil first, and then ink over it, making corrections as you go and rubbing out any traces of pencil that remain. But the daring thing to do is to charge one’s pen and leap right into it, and this is largely how the recent drawings have proceeded, a combination of observed and imaginary images.

Now, as Norman Mailer once noted, dredging through the swamp of one’s mind can be a risky business. You’re painfully aware of your skills (which may be inadequate,) and your ideas (which may be silly.)  It’s a bit of a roller -coaster: Burning buses one day, a vase of flowers the next. Take the detail below. First the Zulu gogo appeared, and  later, having watched a clip of a student talking about a Zulu tradition of sending parcels of lightning to foes, I added the mini lightning bolt.

Sometimes there are little dead ends, and it may be a week or so until one knows what to add next. The solution can turn up in the shape of a newspaper picture, or something in an old book, a conversation, a distant memory. The noise of the present can find itself on the same page as the deeply recessed past. There’s no shortage of stuff that may have inflicted itself on the artist’s psyche: Picasso’s sketchbooks, Van Gogh’s reed drawings done in France. Before that, the comics section of the Sunday Express, especially Prince Valiant. All those World War two comic books (Achtung, schweinhund!)  Also the illustrated books I grew up with – Like Struwelpeter, Kalulu the Hare, Barbara Tyrell’s Tribal Peoples, and Harry Wolhuter’s Memories of a Game Ranger (with illustrations by C.T. Astley-Maberly.) So I’ll leave you with this , from the Memories of a Game Ranger, depicting the part where Harry Wolhuter gets dragged off by a lion. How gruesome, how exciting! Only ink can do it!

 

 

 

 

A pencilman in Kimberley

Kimberley. Not really known as an art epicentre. But wait, in the middle of town there’s the William Humphreys Gallery, one of the country’s finest public art institutions. Your blogger was there in July, showing off his latest work, and I tell you it was good. Under the hand of curator Ann Pretorius, the gallery has assembled a superb permanent collection. There’s a tea- room in a garden which is home to quite a few feral cats, as well as a statue of Queen Victoria. She stares determinedly at the palisade fence, a grandiose relic of a grandiose time. The passing students of Sol Plaatjie university pay Her not the slightest notice.

a tot of Laudanum, anyone?

Approaching Kimberley from the south, you drive through bushveld with many beautiful thorn trees and historic battle sites. After just a little bit of semi- industrial stuff, you’re right in the town. A town that has a lot of history etched into it. This is where South Africa met Modernity. A vast onrushing money -grabbing multinational mob was unleashed right here on the arid plains, and the old pastoral country was dead and buried. Some of that mob did very well for themselves, leaving us some splendid homes to look at, like these in Carrington road.

What is it about these houses? I think they’re marvellous, perfect in every way. So much better than the concrete bunkers favoured by today’s well-to-do. Glance downwards, and the paving stones are carved granite. There they are in the picture above. Hand carved granite paving stones! Not messing around then, your colonial-era road builders.They were in it for the long haul,  thinking Remain,  definitely. Near the CBD,  I found this architectural oddity:

It comes complete with a trashed -out parking lot, and where are the windows? What would a future civilisation make of this edifice? Will they think it a temple to strange gods, the gods of small bright stones? A place where pale-skinned initiates peered for hours at the stones, in rooms without north-facing windows?

After the exhibition opening, we went to the Kimberley Club for a late and large supper. There are ghosts of a former world here, notably bad-hearted Cecil Rhodes. He lurks in the garden, warily keeping an eye on the door. These days, no doubt, new elites are hatching schemes and cutting deals at the same old bar, whiskies in hand. Coming out of the Club, I took a wrong turn and briefly went on a late-night drive through the CBD. For a little while I was lost and suddenly alone in the empty litter -strewn streets. I confess, a primal child- like tightening in the chest crept up on me. Then I came across a gang of black  men repairing the road outside the town hall.

Which way to Du ToitsPan road? I asked.

Ons praat nie Engels nie, praat Afrikaans! said they.

I passed a shebeen along the way. Loud and clear, the sounds of Elvis’s Blue Suede Shoes belted forth out of the darkness. I’m still trying to figure that out, that burst of rockabilly music where I never thought I’d find it.

 

 

Brushes down!

Rand Gold Mine , 90x80cm, oil on canvas,2013

A long time ago, when Hermann Niebuhr came back to Joburg, we made some excursions down Main Reef road, looking for clues to the spirit of Jozi. On the East Rand, close to the fabled Snake Road mine dump, we found some derelict buildings. In the detritus were many small plastic signs that had once steered mineworkers around the equipment that gets the shiny stuff out of the ground. And one of the signs we took back to Lilian Road bore the simple inscription “propane on”.

Over the course of many workshops held on the stoep of Lilian Rd, “propane on” became a key idea in the mythology of how an exhibition comes together. Further workshops revealed that the stages are: 1. Churning or scratching around. 2. Finding your Line and Length. 3  Propane On, and 4. Brushes Down.

I reached Brushes Down last Friday at 6.30pm. I’ve been at the landscape business again, from early January, working towards a June 1 show at the William Humphreys Gallery in Kimberley. It’s a grand moment, make no mistake, but one still has a lot things to do. Like taking stuff to the framers, touching up nicks and scratches on old frames, listing and photographing work, and varnishing the paintings I did two years ago. I like W& N Satin varnish, by the way, and the best thing to apply that with is the Roberson Priming Brush, purchased in London by Marjorie MacLean. It has a copper ferrule and a handle made out of laminated wood, and it lasts forever.

Made in France, nogal

There was a lot of work involving crates. The unpacking and re-packing thereof. My rudimentary carpentry skills were called into service (ah, what a fine invention is the electric screwdriver!) I’ve sent 62 pieces off to the North West, and it was a moment of pure delight when finally the laden truck trundled off down the road. I shall soon be bringing up the rear, with a few stragglers in the back of the Nissan. Onward to Kimberley!

Sometimes a crate notion…..

 

 

The Chapman residency

The oke from Auckland has been doing a residency out at the Wildgarten studio for the last month or so. He got off the plane with a suitcase filled mainly with oil paint. Then he drove out to Wildgarten in the maroon 1996 Jetta and set up shop. Its been two years since his last visit and he’s busy putting out new work to sustain his ties to the Borman Gallery in Cape Town.

I visited Chapman at the studio a few days later. He was waiting for fresh canvases to arrive, but had launched fearlessly into a number of old ones. These have been standing against the wall waiting for another turn. They already have a certain character and history as objects. The roll of 1970’s Belgian linen purchased in Auckland, worked on in De Rust in 2012,and abandoned. That tricky bit of buckling canvas that won’t get straightened out. The edges, streaked with small accretions of paint that give us clues, like the rings of a tree. The work looked promising after the opening salvos. However, one knows that Chapman’s process is no straight road. He’ll take the canvas in all sorts of directions before settling on something he trusts. There’ll be any number of re-workings, the paint coming off and going on in successive bouts of arrival and subversion.

Chapman knows a lot more than most about the behaviour of pigments, their drying times, their opacity or transparency, how they brush out, and so.(The American manufacturer Williamsburg is a favourite.) He’s particular about brushes, too, sometimes re -engineering them for specific tasks. The favourite ones are cherished and used until long after their sell-by date. I came across this trusty old steed in its dying throes:

One could argue that the square-type paintings that have occupied Chapman for the past few years are a vehicle for journeys into pigment and colour that are unhindered by the need to make representations of things. We refer to them as “abstract”, but what does that mean? It still implies an abstraction of things, whereas “non representational” seems a better label, if you must. Personally, I don’t need to hang words onto these works. A look around the studio tells you that this is an artist who is very in love with paint and what it can do. (He will enthuse about the butteriness of Flake White, the need for a true Cerulean Blue, or the transparency of Williamsburg’s Ardois Grey.)

Colour in the new paintings is restrained. They don’t shout at you. They draw you in in a matter-of-fact kind of way. So, is there more to this than meets the eye? Well, yes. There’s the life of the painter to consider, the sense of craft, the sense of a lineage. In some esoteric way these all flit in and out of a painter’s consciousness and onto the canvas. Of the many painters we’ve talked about over the last few weeks, Chapman holds a special regard for the sage of Italian still life, Giorgio Morandi. Among the living, he likes Peter Doig and the New York abstract painter Amy Sillman. The work of those artists might help to map out points of reference for these paintings. But so might the taste of a good Chenin Blanc after a hard day’s slog. Or a long leisurely stroll through the mountains with an Africanis by your side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christmas card

Dear Reader

Latterly, you may have noticed a great scarcity of reports from this absent blogger. The Pierneef project is still simmering, I’ve just got the flame turned down for a bit. In early November, I ventured once more to the Drakensberg, making a day trip into Lesotho on the way. Those Maloti mountains are lovely, but the Pierneef site remains elusive. I came back with about 500 photographs and have no inclination to work my through them, let alone actually write about the adventure. Instead, I find myself drawn to the smell of freshly – cut linoleum and printing ink. Ah, the pleasures of the linocut! So old – fashioned and challenging in its simplicity! Without further ado then, loyal subscribers, here is this year’s Christmas card.

Great good greetings to all of you, and have a fab 2016!

Mr Smith at work

I visited Richard Smith in his studio on a balmy Spring day last week. Smith has been living in Onrus, near Hermanus, for more than a decade. He works at home, upstairs, and has a view of a pleasing expanse of lawn hemmed in by big bluegum trees. His wife Li, also a painter, has her studio downstairs and they share the space with a dog and two tabby cats. The studio is neatly kept. Smith is an organised kind of a painter – one has the sense here of well-established systems, of working to deadline. He is preparing work for his November show at Ebony, in Cape Town, and going into the critical last 6 weeks. There are canvases on easels, more canvases hanging from the eves, and one lying flat on the floor, which he approaches keenly. “Look at this – I’m very excited about some of the things happening here. ” He points to an area where he’s dragged a big house-painting brush through wet oil paint, leaving a multi-coloured smear in the centre of the canvas.

He leaps to another canvas leaning on an easel. “This one’s showing potential.” There’s a figure, loosely tacked in with a brush, on a pinkish background, offset by a fierce cadmium yellow.”This one still needs something, I’m going to put it away for a while and then look at it again.” He points to another large canvas – a nude male figure leans on a pedestal in a nascent cityscape. “I killed that one,” he says, exasperated. “It’s overworked. It’s dead!” There’s a subtle difference between the two, but, compared to the pink canvas, the nude somehow lacks urgency. The element of self-surprise – even puzzlement – is Smith’s bread and butter. “Yes,” he says, ” the painterly process is all important. It’s about doing something that isn’t preconceived. I want to find colours I haven’t seen before.” He scrutinizes more of the canvases close up. “These backgrounds are very light, perhaps too light.” There are expanses of light greys, some pink-hued, others blue-grey, made up of interlocking brushstrokes of varying thickness. Daubs and dabs of colour enliven the surface and there are remnants or beginnings of subtle line drawings that have been engraved into the paint. It is from these accretions of paint that ideas emerge, and the content of the painting begins to reveal itself. The areas where paint collides are like fields of energy from which ideas sprout. They blossom or are ploughed back into the field to emerge later.

We don’t talk much about the content of the painting, as if the question is somehow invasive. At times, Smith will even deny that he’s responsible for imagery. He points to a fish flipping its way onto a canvas. “Look at that fish, I don’t know how it got there or what it’s going to do.” Fair enough, the likes of Picasso and T S Eliot were similarly reluctant to expound on their imagery. Many painters view painting as an autonomous language – to think that painting can be explained in terms other than its own is to miss the point. And these paintings, which you could call “figurative,” are deeply attached to a tenet of much abstract painting: that the act of painting is itself the content of the painting. This way of working is as much a journey into uncharted realms as it is a desire on Smith’s part to subvert his exceptional ability to articulate objects and ideas. He is that rare artist who can draw – on command – what he pleases: A rhino, a dog, a Greek temple, whatever. The current procedure subverts the temptation to easily knock out pictures. The intent is to avoid formulas. ” Lots of artists who are commercially successful get stuck in a formulaic way of doing things. When that happens, you’re dead.” But he acknowledges that professional painters are subject to the whims and fancies of market forces. And despite the dogged example of thwarted early modernists like Cezanne, most painters have pretty fragile egos. “Frankly,” says Smith, “we actually do need the recognition that sales give us.”

Death of Sardanapalus (detail)

Smith admires R B Kitaj, as well as the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, both consumate draftspeople with a potent ability to express complex and mysterious stories. And he has a favourite painting: Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapulus, that great heaving drama of sex and death. Although Smith is not given to angst, there are some heavier, somber paintings emerging.

Smith’s new show is titled ” Music and no music.” Smith certainly plays music, and he listens widely to music while painting. The sound of painting is the sound of a bristle brush on canvas, footsteps going back and forth, sharp intakes of air, sighs of despondency. But that’s not what he’s talking about. The music is the sound of serendipity, the state of joyous flow that brings things into being.”How important is Art, really?,” he asks “there’s this whole world of galleries, international art fairs and so on, all manufacturing importance, telling us how important Art is, but at the end of the day, a lot of it is fashion and propaganda.” Smith has got beyond all that now – it doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is to make the music.

c  Carl Becker  September 2015

A quick hit of Joburg

This is Pierneef’s Station Panel called Rand Gold Mine. We believe it is the old City Deep mine (Thanks, NJ Coetzee) I’ve tried unsuccessfully to locate this, but that’s not why I was in Joburg. It was for the opening of ” A Space for Landscape” – the Pierneef show at the Standard Bank Gallery in town. Meticulously and thoughtfully curated by Wilhelm van Rensburg, it is a must-see. But don’t go into town anywhere near rush hour. People arrived late for the opening, in a slightly shattered state, having churned their way through the gridlocked cbd traffic. Stephan Welz and his wife, trapped in their car, were the subjects of an attempted robbery. In a rare case of instant Karma, the robber was immediately thumped down and handcuffed by alert security manne. Fear and loathing, stupidity and heroism – ah yes, the Joburg story.

The famous view from Lilian Rd studios

I had an exhibition at Hodgins House, Sarah Ballam’s art space in Parktown. (It went well, thanks mense.) With that behind me, I went for a curry on the balcony of the old Lilian Rd studio in Fordsburg.On the way through Mayfair I saw women in burkhas, semi-derelict shops, down and out men eating crusts of bread, elegantly-dressed Somalis. There was the familiar honk of urine outside the studio entrance, the usual smell of oil and cooking rotis wafting up from Mohammadis down below. Lou Almon and I sat on the stoep eating our felafel and gingerly tasting a pulped avocado and date drink. (Why the hell did I order that?) Minibuses in the street and pigeons dotting the sky.The city looked good in the midwinter light. Fred de Vries, the writer, once asked us ” Is this place on its way up or on its way down?” The question remains, in ever widening circles. Joburg. South Africa. Up one moment, down the next. Going sideways. My sense of Joburg – and this is just a view from the leafy suburbs – is that, like the winter shadows, things are getting starker: more crime, more desperation, the gulf between the haves and the rest ever-widening. But there are wonders of modernity to counter the darkness – the Gautrain, the neon hoopla of the Sandton skyline, new stuff, money.

On my out of the studio I met my mate Multi, a security bloke who has his beat nearby. While we were talking, a large and very at-home looking rat picked its way through the junk across the road. “You could shoot that with your gun, Multi” I said. His eyes lit up at the thought. ” Yes, I could, one time! Dead!” He pronounces this like there was a T after the “d”, which underscores the termination of the matter. And then again, gleefully, “DeadT!”

I visited my friend Brian Green in Forest Town  From his stoep you look out over a fine old Joburg garden to the northern suburbs. There are big trees, a pool, and the odd chicken scratching underneath hedges. Brian is one of the good guys. He’s worked out how to turn around urban spaces like 44 Stanley Avenue and make them into going concerns. He’s also collected a good deal of art over the years, and I managed to finally take a digital image of a painting of mine. Its called “Dump Bacchanal” and is a shambolic view of the sad and happy highveld, circa 1997. Not the kind of ending, I guess, that orderley Henk Pierneef would have wanted to see.

Mountain Gazing

Pierneef’s version of Table Mountain. Puzzling, this. For a while I thought it was the mountain from the Somerset West side (in the pre-Khayalithsa,era of course.) I made discreet appeals for help and my Capetonian friends directed me to the other side. The view is of the mountain from Signal Hill, more or less at the base of Lion’s Head. Pierneef was up to his tricks here again, cannily hiding the left side of the mountain beneath cloud, and obfuscating the receding Apostles on the right. Faced with the often-depicted panorama, he’s zoomed in to make it look like a free-standing peak.

JH Pierneef .Table Mountain. Oil on canvas, c1932

Standing at the site, this is what you see:

The wide angle shot

And if you zero in you get this:

Now what about those hulking great pine trees? A little bit further up the Signal Hill drive, I found them:

I reckon these pines, the ones in the Pierneef, once extended closer to Table Mountain and have since been cut back or burnt. And of course there’s the cable car enclosure – an extra bit of concrete peak – when did that get built?

I revisited the site on a hot afternoon last week and scrambling over the edge and down a steep slope settled down to a watercolour. I was in another little world here, sitting on a bed of pine needles with the muted sounds of the city below on the left, and a cooling breeze coming over the hill from Camp’s Bay. There were occasional voices of walkers or cars on the road above me to remind me of the parallel world that I’d briefly left behind. And also subliminal fears, like what would happen if I was fallen upon by a crazed Tik- head? These things have happened on the mountain. All I had for self-defence was a blade I use to sharpen my pencils. Mind you, that could do some damage if it it hits the jugular…ag no man, just look at the mountain! Or think of Turner in Venice in 1840, making the world’s most serene and beautiful watercolours, prowling the streets armed with a dagger to fight off the Venetian tsotsis. (Fortunately he never had to.)

At one point, a German couple appeared above me. The man came down a bit, slipping on the pine needles. He scrambled about in the undergrowth, with the woman shouting instructions from above…”ja, das ist schon, nein, das ist nich schon” and so on. I have no idea what they were looking for, but the Teutonic soundtrack was somehow dead right for the Alpine vista. The watercolour came out ok, and I gathered my things together and headed down the hill for a cup of late afternoon tea.

 

A summer song from uncle Philip

Summer at the Southern tip of Africa. January already gone and one scratches around for direction. The garage is filled with boxes of books and five crates of my paintings, recently returned from Durban. Oh yes, there’s no shortage of things to do, but urgency melts away under the glorious sun. So here’s a fitting little summer poem from that melancholy Englishman Philip Larkin.

 

 

Long lion days

Start with white haze.

By midday you meet

A hammer of heat –

Whatever was sown

Now fully grown,

Whatever conceived

Now fully leaved,

Abounding, ablaze –

O long lion days!

Travels with Landcruiser

The dirt road to Sutherland, that cold karoo dorpie deep in the interior. I’m driving an antiquated Land Cruiser, all the way to Joburg. Its a slow old beast, rattling and whining like a Bedford truck, but the high-up view is great, and rolling along at 65kph on the dirt is what it lives for.

  Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with Pierneef. I’m doing this for a friend, and I’m indulging my need for big skies and min mense. The chosen route goes from Hermanus to Sutherland via Ceres, and then across the plains to Fraserburg, then Loxton, Victoria West and on to the N12 to Kimberley. Obscure, yes, but this was once the most direct route to Kimberley, favoured by transport riders taking provisions up to the diamond diggings. I’m also testing my theory that the experience of the Sublime – the sense of awe when confronted by an Alpine vista – is also absolutely to be had from Flatness. There’s that, and there’s the general idea of an end-of-year journey, a time to let stuff percolate. People do drugs, yoga, meditation or whatever to get a sense of perspective, but a road trip is the business in my book.

The inscriptions on the landscape left by hardy pioneering types have gravitas and tell of long struggles

against the odds. There are small drifts and passes too, getting higher up, and unusual, specific plant forms.

    

I was looking at one of these when I heard the dreaded bubbling sound coming from deep within the heart of the beast. Yip, she was boiling. Sunday afternoon, no-one on the road, no cell phone reception, 80ks from Sutherland. I was strangely unconcerned. I had water and food. Oh ja, and pencil and paper. I got a chair out of the back of the car and settled down to my first drawing of the trip. Pierneef would have approved, I’m sure. After a while an old Toyota bakkie came along. Inside it was a man called Anton and his sleepy wife. He said he was a foreman at the nearest farm and was a Kavango from northern Namibia. We drove back to the farm and flushed out the radiator. “You’re gonna make it to Sutherland now, “said Anton, and although I knew he hadn’t fixed the problem I was desperate to believe him.

The Kavango cowboy

Before you get onto the Sutherland plateau there is 15 ks of uphill starting with the aptly -named Verlorenkloof. I got a long way up that never-ending slope before the needle started spiking again. There I was, with the bonnet open and the day drawing to a close when the next Samaritan appeared. Another farmer and his wife in an old white Toyota bakkie. Staying in the car, with just a hint of a smile on his face, he made the diagnosis: ” Hy kook seker, ne?” Then told me to put the heater on full blast, and it had the magical effect of bringing the needle down straight away. ” Vat it maar kalm,” he said, ” ek volg jou agterna.”

I was impressed, relieved and grateful, and with a magenta light hitting the karoo scrub, I drove into the wide streets of Sutherland. Day One in the Cruiser: I’d met some interesting people and seen some pretty good stuff. And I had a couple of drawings under the belt too. What more can an oke ask for?

Ah, the plateau at last!

 

 

 

 

 

Around the next foothill…

JH Pierneef, Mont au Sources. c 1931

Mont aux Sources. Not the usual view of the famed Amphitheatre, but a view taken from deep down in the Thukela Gorge. On the map, an 8 to 10k roundabout walk from Tendele bungalows. On a fine morning, I strode out manfully. OK, I set out, slowly. For the last two decades, I’ve been bizarrely plagued by chronic fatigue syndrome. Walking -as we normally know it- has been a bit of a challenge, and this was a big walk in my book. But I figured if I walked really slowly I could do it. In my bag, I had an A4 size sketchbook, pencils, a watercolour kit, digital camera, phone, water, boerewors, a boiled egg, salt, and some cherries from Ficksburg. I also had a sachet of D- Ribose, a magic sugar that is supposed to support the mitochondria, those little energy factories in our cells.

The landscape is splendid, invigorating. It’s no co-incidence that landscape painting took off in the late 1700s just as people were losing their religion. For the new agnostics, the spiritual path went to Nature rather than the Church. Landscape painting will, at some stage, make you ponder forces larger than yourself. Aside from the sheer scale of things, there’s non- human time. Away from our usual distractions, a day can be a very long thing as the sun works its way over the 150 million -year -old cliffs. Even in Pierneef’s time, Nature was seen as eternal, proof of an Almighty. But in the 21st century, this is a fragile remnant, a world threatened by us in all sorts of ways.

Along the way I met plenty of pale skinned European hikers, sunning themselves in the African Alps. One of them was a German called Mark Muller who offered to send me a pic if he found the Pierneef site.

Greetings from the North!

I ambled on, making sketches along the way. But two and half hours in, there were still plenty of hills to walk around before the fabled Gorge. I turned back, knowing that I was frustratingly close but also with relief. I was getting way out of my league. A week later, I got this photo from Mr Muller. See how those hills on the right match the original Pierneef?  Yes, this was the site. Now I’ll have to get back there somehow. Anybody got any steroids?

The oil painting is “Good day Monsieur Courbet.” by Gustave Courbet. (1854)

The brooding Berg

And so to the three Pierneef KZN sites. A quick online search reveals that Pierneef’s panel simply titled “Drakensberg” is the Sentinel, that jutting lump of basalt to the right of the Amphitheatre. The second mountain painting is Mont aux Sources. The way to get to these is through Tendele camp, in the Royal Natal National Park. A world heritage site and a little piece of heaven if ever there was one. Nice one, Henk. On your trail I’ve been down some crooked paths, spent strange nights in bad taste game lodges, trawled the nether regions of no – hope Noupoort and been kicked off disused mining property in Joburg. I’ve met fierce frontiersmen in Louis Trichardt and I’ve sat pondering the elegance of your handwriting in the National Archives. I’ve seen your serene landscapes rudely interrupted by four lane highways, hooting trucks, Tuscan townhouses and the rolling carnival of modernity that is South Africa today. Sometimes the trail runs cold. Others, its like going through a wormhole, back into a lost world.

JH Pierneef
Drakensberg 127x 140 cm
c1931

Pierneef’s Drakensberg is indeed a place of dragons, brooding and mysterious. Making tea on a bright morning I looked around and seated on the breakfast table behind me was a large chacma baboon. I ordered him out and he left the bungalow clutching some canderel sachets and a lemon, looking hurt. Then he sat on the patio table and looked through the window at me eating my breakfast. I threw a jug of water at him. He gave me a very sour look.

Wat kyk JY?

Later that day, the mood changed and heavy Pierneefian cloud settled around the mountains. It stayed like that for several days. I slept, I read, I made drawings of trees and starlings. No clear view of the enshrouded peaks. Happily, I prolonged my stay. As many an Alpine wanderer has noted, the mountains have the effect of expanding the soul. Rich fragrances float on the breeze. Notes on a drawing list these as ” honey… turkey shed in Pretoria….grandfather’s Tabac.” The high air gets into obscure crevices of memory it seems. When the sky opened up I drew and did quick watercolours. The foothills have a lot of grey and red in them, and the deep langorous shadows suggest Ultramarine. Nature is big here and very changeable, a visual feast of monumental forms. And never enough time to get it all down.

.

How to draw a dog

Three images of dogs in painting that come to mind:

Jan van Eyck’s ” Arnolfini Wedding” from 1434 is one of the early wonders of oil painting, and it shows the superior capabilities of oil over tempera. At the feet of the bridal couple stands a little hound, a Flemish poodle of sorts, every hair of its coat meticulously present. The dog stands for fidelity, but it also announces its proud ownership of the marital couple. Below is a detail from Titian’s “The death of Acteon,” in the National Gallery, London.

It was painted in 1560 and shows Acteon being turned into a deer and set upon by his own hunting dogs. This as punishment for spying on the bathing goddess Diana. Rather harsh, that.

There is Goya’s “Head of a dog” from the early 1820’s.

Head of a Dog.(detail)

The dog appears marooned in quicksand and stares up into a vast expanse of nothingness. A remarkably modern and poignant painting, done on the walls of his farmhouse near Madrid and only seen by the public many years after his death.

I’ve done a lot of drawings of our Africanis over the last four years. Here she is with her farm buddy (the aptly named Blackie) having an afternoon nap . Unusually, both dogs kept still long enough for me to make the drawing. The Overbergian landscape was washed in with gouache and watercolour afterwards.

Two dogs sleeping. Gouache. 24 x 27 cm. 2014

So how do you draw a dog?

For starters, we can’t make rules that apply to the anatomy, like we do with the human figure. (The head goes into the body 6 times, and so on). There’s just too much variety of canine form.

I suggest you start with a sleeping dog, and get to work rapidly with a sharp pencil. Keep an eye on the negative spaces and don’t give up. You’ll soon get the hang of the alien physiology. There are no tricks, no formulas, it’s just a matter of observation and developing your visual memory. You may want to bear in mind John Ruskin’s words; “The true zeal and patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and inattentive labour of a whole day.” Your pencil will soon start to tell the truth. And hopefully the sleeping dog will lie.

Le petit dejeneur des litterateurs

As we crested the Franschoek Pass, the town lay way below in a patchwork of winelands, the proverbial jewel in the crown. It was the literary festival, and we were on our way to breakfast with some of my writer friends. Franschoek is a kind of a paradise, the living embodiment of everything old Tinus de Jongh liked to paint.

Oh no not another beautiful Cape mountain scene

We were eating, appropriately, at the Pierneef restaurant at the La Motte wine estate. The Rupert-Koegelenbergs own this 130 hectare swatch of heaven. You can sample organically grown wine, eat great food and top up your art education at the La Motte museum. Rupert art patronage extends well back into the 80s, when Anton Rupert sponsored the famous Rembrandt Triennales. We admired Kentridge’s audacious  “Conservationist’s Ball,” a defining work of the era, perhaps. But the real thing at La Motte is the collection of early Pierneef work, most of it acquired from Pierneef’s daughter. Looking carefully, you see him going from an early Art Nouveau mode into Impressionist and plein air work, and then the experiments with “cubism.” There are works in many media too, watercolours, gouaches, oils and that most esoteric painting medium, casein. There are also a few duds here: a seasick rendering of the Sierra Nevada, a clunky Aloe, and a school project-like “Khoisan” painting. They tell of the long and perilous path to artistic autonomy; the singular quest for a personal style.

Bosveld Stormwolke, 1920. Gouache

Our breakfast was good and my writer friends were in extroverted form. They believe strongly in their craft, and it distresses them that the visual arts have jettisoned the craft of art. Steven Sidley, who also happens to be a handy saxophone player, advanced the theory that the arts have a craft component which needs fluency before the “art” gets made. You can’t improvise until you know your scales.

Of all the arts, contemporary visual arts require the least apprenticeship. There are complex reasons for this, but in short, sometime in the mid C19th, the camera released painting from its need to describe the world. This opened a floodgate of new forms of expression within painting (all the “isms), followed by a century obsessed with innovation for its own sake. By the 1970s it was fashionable to declare that painting was dead. The craft  in painting – drawing, a knowledge of colour, a basic methodology of constructing a painting- was no longer needed to make art, and so the institutional knowledge died. Even at school level today, the emphasis is often on the “conceptual’ rather than the “craft”. I have artist friends who rail against this state of affairs, but they’re pissing against the wind. In this era of digital distraction, painting is just one of many vehicles of expression, take it or leave it. Surprisingly, a lot of people do still take it: there are more feet through museum doors than ever before, amateur painting groups thrive, and if the high standard of entries to last year’s Sanlam portrait competition is anything to go by, there are a lot of good, serious young painters out there. For some reason, daubing a woven fabric with coloured muddy oily stuff still appeals. Allez des literateurs! Allez les peintures!

Tyd om te trek. Bring die voorlaaier! En jou kwasse!

The grand Ann Bryant

City Hall en passant

And so with Pierneef  to the Eastern Cape, to the mysterious world of East London. I tell people I’m having a show there and they softly mouth the words “East London” in an “ag shame” way, and the conversation ends. They don’t know what to say: I might as well be showing in outer space. How desperate, to be scrabbling about where nothing ever happens! True, East London does feel like a town past its glory days. The lovely colonial and deco buildings of Oxford street have taken a knock, but it’s the transforming –  the sense of the frontier –  that makes the Buffalo City so interesting.

The gallery was built in 1905 , and bought in 1907 by the prosperous Bryant family. The colonial English went forth and made replicas of their world. They named their suburbs and streets Berea, St Andrews and St Marks, and they came to stay with all the confidence of a conquering race. In this mini London, the well-to-do copied and even outdid the standards of the metropolis. From the ceilings to the parquet floors and art nouveau door handles no expense was spared. The far sighted matriarch bequethed it all to the city and, after recent restoration, the house looks grand again. In the garden, the coach house doubles as coffee shop and extra gallery, and between venues they have up to twenty shows a year.

There’s a rare portrait of Wordsworth here, much coveted by the Wordsworth Trust. Here’s the wandering poet of the lonely cloud, looking somewhat homesick. Or perhaps alarmed at the sudden appearance of all those threatening Pierneefian cumulonimbus things.

With the exhibition formalities done, I took to sightseeing with my old china Mr Donnelly. Down at the beachfront we met some Zimbabwean craftsfolk. Sales, they told me, were fair to middling. They too were a long way from home. We took the road down the coast, the Indian ocean on our left and dense euphorbia -dotted hills to our right. We stopped at the mouth of the Great Fish river, that contested line between Xhosa and Settler worlds. Nothing really to mark its importance, just a couple of fishermen trying their luck off the beach. Okes with surnames like Bowker, Pringle or Emslie, no doubt. We had a toasted chicken mayo sarmie at the Great Fish Diner, bought a Cob from a man next to the road, and headed home.

Frontier ahoy!

Life Class

 

Way back in the twentieth century I attended an art school in the backwaters of the Eastern Cape. One of the advantages was that the Graham Hotel – with Castle Lager at 40 cents a shot – was 5 minutes walk away. Another was that it steadfastly refused the tide of innovation that held sway in big city art schools. Archaic practices like life drawing were firmly adhered to. Teaching – as invented by the tyrant Henry Tonks of the Slade art school – lived on in the deep colonial periphery. First year: pencil drawing from casts. Second year: still life painting and anatomy studies. Third year:  life painting. And despite one’s youthful indiscipline, one could not help being enriched by this.

Our life class convenes on a Wednesday morning at the Hornbill Gallery. We’re middle aged, our youthful competitive urges long gone. We’re all artists of one sort or another – trying to lift our game, to hone our craft. No-one gives instruction – a level of competence is assumed. Life drawing is a wonderful ego corrective, should you need reminding of how difficult this game is. You go through a wide range of emotions; hope, curiosity, then self doubt,  frustration and humility. One yearns for improvement. However, there’s no discernible upward graph: small gains are followed by smudges and reversals. That well rendered arm ends in a clump of viennas for fingers. That satisfying line is misplaced on the page: start again. But looking at the drawings later, there’s always something: just enough to keep you going back for more.

We warm up with quick, minute-long poses. Our model Kim does what she likes and we follow. Later we do longer reclining poses. There’s a conversation about these, an ebb and flow between artist and model. Unlike say, Degas or Lucien Freud, who were famous torturers of the model, this is very egalitarian. The class is mainly female; that may be why. Modelling intends to project something: sexuality, opulence, cool sunglasses. This is a presentation of one’s form, unadorned. It takes something though to survive the close scrutiny of ten sets of eyes, and Kim has it: the rare knack of being present and absent at the same time. During short breaks we look at each other’s drawings and offer encouragement or appreciation. And then we are back to the business. Look , there it is, this mysterious living thing. That neck at that angle, that hand resting on that leg, will never be exactly there again. Here it is, ticking away, trickling away, your life and mine. Get it down while you can.