Paying Attention

I have been listening to a lot of artist's podcasts - too many, there are a million of them out there! But a couple of phrases have stuck in my head from other nuggets of wisdom I've heard recently. (I will credit them here if I can find my bitty notes, but both have recurred in a few interviews.) 

One, regarding subject matter, is "Pay Attention To What You Pay Attention to" (sounds obvious doesn't it?) and the other is "Work in Series". I think both of these will help with frustration at myself for continuing to have such a diverse range of styles, medium and subjects. I dread the question, "So, what do you paint?" and should really have a ready reply by now!

Something that keeps stopping me in my tracks with a longing to capture them, are the groups or pairs of (usually) women in local streets, chatting, sitting or walking around - wearing bright colours, with umbrellas, children on backs or otherwise attached; mostly in summer when shadows are strong or people are out and about later in the day. Such a warm, convivial feature of Johannesburg, I've painted and sketched these scenes often but haven't found THE way to do them that isn't a rather slavish copy of a photo, but more finished than an urban sketch. I did two versions of this group - dressed all in white in this case, walking home from church through the leafy green streets of Emmarentia - trying to keep to strong, simple shapes, the results not what I'm after yet... are they ever though? 

A Trip to Soweto

Soweto has been a place on Joburg Sketchers bucket list for years, but somehow we hadn't got it together to find out exactly how to get there, where to park or walk or sketch - it's a vast sprawling area of many suburbs, full of houses and streets that look very similar to the passing eye as you whizz by on the highway.

But when visiting Swedish sketcher Holger and his wife Susanne, and my friend Jane from Cape Town, said they'd like to go, we decided the time had come to venture forth. As it turned out, it was pretty easy - five of us in my car on a Friday morning, past Johannesburg city centre, onto the N1 Western Bypass, turn right and there in front of us were the iconic Orlando Towers, originally cooling towers for a coal power station, now an adventure destination where you can bungee jump, abseil, zip-line and swing from those heights (um, no thanks very much!)

Wiggling through a maze of very sketchable streets full of children playing, neighbours chatting and general community activity, we found our way to the famous Vilakazi Street, and had immediate, copious offers to help us park, watch/wash our car, sing/dance/guide for us, as well as countless shops, vendors, and restaurants vying for business  - we had to explain that we were just there to sit and draw which caused some puzzlement and then fascination -  I wished we'd brought a stack of blank exercise books so that everyone who stopped to watch could have joined in, and I wish I'd had more time and energy to sketch more of the colourful busyness of the street.

We decided not to partake of the rather touristy-priced lunches on offer and headed back, stopping to sketch the towers on the way out - in blazing midday sun we squeezed into the only little strip of shade we could find with a view, outside Bara Mall. Fast sketching as even the South Africans were expiring from the heat, let alone our Swedish visitors!

Cactus Shadows

It's very late in January, but here's wishing everyone a happy, creative and peaceandlove-filled 2018. Wishing lots of water to those who are fast running out - Cape Town and its surrounding areas have something like 90 days supply left, with the rainy season only starting after that.

Here is a postcard I painted for the annual @Twitrartexhibit happening in Canberra, Australia this year, and supporting Pegasus Riding for the Disabled. It's a hot, dry scene from a photo I took at Babylonstoren, a lovely garden farm near Franschhoek. I loved the shadows and may do a bigger watercolour from the same reference - it was hard to control on such a small scale! 

If you'd like to support this, you need to have a Twitter account (I have one that I don't use very much) and get your 16x12 cm postcard to Australia by 6 March. Details can be found here. 

That's it for now - I'm sketching a lot with visiting friends who are very keen to do that, so will post some of those soon!

And a Grey Lourie in a Plum Tree

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

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

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

Chinese New Year at Nan Hua

The Worldwide Sketchcrawl where urban sketchers around the world planned to sketch their city's Chinese New Year celebrations was on Saturday 28 January. Johannesburg had at least three CNY celebrations in different venues - one that night in 'Old Chinatown' in Commissioner St in the city; one the following day at the Nan Hua Buddhist Temple near a town called Bronkhorstspruit, about an hour and a half's drive from Joburg - the one we decided to go to as a place we'd always wanted to visit; and another a week later in 'New Chinatown' in Cyrildene, east of the city. So we missed the official Crawl, but our spirit was with everybody (and as someone said, it's still the 28th somewhere!)

Our carload of five sketchers arrived just too late for the opening ceremony with Dancing Dragon, firecrackers, and other spectacles - I thought there'd be more but that was it. We gathered at the entrance - an encouragingly large group of us - just in time to see the dragon being folded away into its trailer. The first pen I grabbed out my bag flew to catch those few moments before it disappeared, and I think it's my favourite sketch of the day!

The many temples and shrines around the arena were beautiful subjects, and I had a go, but attempting the intricacies of those was going to take too long, so I tried some sketching shorthand with squiggly lines and loose washes. I wanted to capture some of the people - two sweet little girls in their New Year best, their big brother escaped before I got him on paper.

There were loads of food stalls lining the passages around the centre courtyard, and even more people trying to buy it... I didn't try hauling out a sketchbook and pen in the crush, but managed to get hold of a spring roll and settled to sketch one of the picnic groups with greasy fingers.

The Wishing Tree, where you have your name inscribed in Chinese calligraphy on a ribbon with a medallion attached, and throw it up into the tree while you make a wish. If the ribbon sticks there, your wish will come true during this Year of the Red Rooster. I didn't risk it! Nan Hua is a huge place and apparently we missed lots more interesting sights and events, but that was about all I could manage in the heat and crowds before the long drive home.

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!

A Thursday Morning in Bertrams

The sketchers group has been getting a lot of invitations lately - as Joburg warms up (and then some!) and events are planned before the rush for the coast in December.

One was to sketch some Street Theatre in the little, poverty stricken suburb of Bertrams just south of the city. We decided to go to a rehearsal on a Thursday morning, but sadly it had been rescheduled without our knowledge - so we found ourselves banging on an unresponsive corrugated iron gate in an famously lawless area. We recklessly decided to unfold our chairs on a corner and start drawing in spite of warnings by concerned individuals to keep our car doors locked etc etc.

As is usually the case when we venture out into Joburg's vastly varied streets, we soon felt part of the furniture as locals passed us by, some stopping to look and chat about drawing, some taking no notice; a father ushering his two sweet little boys to say hello to the gogos (grandmothers); an undoubted illicit exchange between a young chap and a passing mini-bus taxi driver; a woman coming to tell us her story of being kicked out of the nearby home for vulnerable people and being taken in by her kind friend, who came to join the conversation; men changing their car oil and pouring the old stuff into the empty plot next to us (ulp! - sometimes you have to just keep your mouth shut!) Only one very interested look into my sketching bag...luckily he wasn't interested in pens and paint. In the distance a corner café was bustling with activity, the peeling bark of the plane trees leading to it reflecting the surfaces of the decaying but still beautiful buildings.

It felt like street theatre in a way, even without the actors.

[And hooray, my blog list is back!]

Braamfontein Cemetery

Our sketchers group went to the historic Braamfontein Cemetery on our last Saturday outing - a place I've driven past hundreds of times, vaguely wondering what was behind the dilapidated fences. Doing some research, I was astounded by the number of significant events and people in Johannesburg that are commemorated here. 

It's divided into sections, including an Anglo-Boer War section, Jewish, Muslim and Chinese sections, firemen & policemen, priests & nuns, and the School of Mines section holding 12000 miners - now represented by a green field and a single huge granite cube which guards the remains of Enoch Sontonga, who wrote our national anthem 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' - as well as many other graves of early Johannesburgers. Also a Dynamite Memorial for when a train, loaded with dynamite for the mines stood in the hot sun and exploded in 1896, destroying 1500 houses and killing hundreds of people, horses and donkeys.

One very moving grave was that of 24 year old Chow Kwai For, who registered under a new law requiring racial registration, unaware that the Chinese community was refusing to do so as a protest against it (he spoke a different dialect and hadn't understood). When he realised what he had done he committed suicide. His letter of apology is engraved on his headstone in Chinese. Sadly looking a bit derelict as are many, but still with a bunch of dried flowers placed before it.

We - and especially me, I seem to be a magnet for them - had been plagued by mosquitoes the whole morning and at this final stop in a remote and neglected part of the cemetery (not sure what section it represented) I found the mother-lode. Trying to draw as fast as possible while squirming and swatting at mozzies made for some interesting linework. Though I quite like the result, I wouldn't recommend it as a sketching technique!

Killarney Style

 A lovely day to go sketching, in the lovely suburb of Killarney on Saturday. Although it's known as 'flatland' because it consists almost entirely of blocks of flats or apartments, many of them are historic Art Deco buildings, the streets are well lined with lush green trees and the rich variety of locals strolling the streets are friendly and welcoming.
I sat at the gate of the park where we sketched the suburb's Spring Day back in 2014 with Whitehall Court across the road and tried to capture the shady elegance of its pillars and balconies. There was a constant coming and going of visitors and residents, all infused with an easy-going, relaxed rhythm. So many stopped to chat, a real vibe of a vibrant and interactive community where everyone seemed to know each other.

The venue was suggested by Fiver Löcker, visiting South Africa again and staying this time in Killarney. She invited us all up to her flat for tea and cake, and of course to sketch the view from her balcony - a huge expanse of sky (watching lightning storms there must be spectacular!) with a broad flat vista of the Northern suburbs. I drew a small section, leaving out the big beautiful sky - I need lessons in cloud painting as well as much better paper - and picked out the ever present cranes, you wouldn't think we were in a recession with the constant building operations going on.
Every now and then I threw down my cityscape for my other sketchbook as people walked past to try and snatch impressions of the colour and movement below. They do all seem to be women, but they are the most interesting, colourful and varied to sketch aren't they!?

Holiday Snaps

From the picturesquely perfect little town of Franschhoek in the Western Cape, more sketches from our holiday. I was determined to do some in spite of lots of eating, drinking, socialising and driving around. I'm only about halfway through Marc Holmes' Craftsy course on Travel Sketching but I took some of his tips on doing simple line drawings in the minutes you do have, and embellishing them later with texture and/or colour when you have a few more. Way off his high standards, but I'm pretty pleased with having been able to capture some little vignettes of our trip!

This was from under a big cool pine tree next to an African market that my companions were shopping at - looking through a rose garden towards restaurants and shops on the Main Road to part of the beautiful mountain bowl that surrounds the town.

 A derelict heritage building dating back to Simon van der Stel and French Huguenot times that is due for restoration, on a small farm near the village. Such textures and colours on the whitewashed walls, corrugated tin roof and ancient vines - could sit and paint this for weeks!

Lunch at the Franschhoek Station now turned into a pub restaurant - the old railway station of which, incidentally, my husband's grandfather was the stationmaster in the 1920's. His mother and some of her siblings were born and went to school in Franschhoek, a very different place from the high-end tourist destination it is now. We visited here a few years ago before it had been converted. It was a bit run down but without all the canopies and pub furniture, was much easier to visualise him standing on the platform blowing his whistle... wish I'd sketched it then! Waiters Yolanda and Romarsha noticed me sketching and obligingly hovered within view so I could add them to the scene - I sent them the image but hope they see themselves here too...

Wrapping up 2015 - Happy New Year!

Time to say goodbye to 2015, and a tumultuous old year it has been. Long warned of climate change seems to have arrived with a vengeance, or is it just El Nino again? I just know it's too darn hot! Our rainbow nation has turned into a confused and worrisome kaleidoscope of corruption, leaderlessness and fiscal woes with strikes, protests and marches always in the news. These sketches from the #ZumaMustFall march in Cape Town that we joined - there were similar scenes in Joburg and Pretoria.

But let's not dwell on that...

My blog - halfway through its 9th year - has mainly focused on urban sketching, which brought happy times and camaraderie with other sketchers, both locally and visiting from afar. I'm uncomfortably aware that my drawing style has become ever faster and sketchier, ie scrappier and less attractive - I haven't been drawing regularly enough outside of scheduled sketch dates which is one thing I plan to change in 2016.

As usual, I've been torn between artistic pursuits - urban sketching, painting, illustrating - and having now reached a 'mature' age, probably should accept that I never will concentrate completely on just one form of artistic expression or identity.

Deciding to forego another full painting course this year, much as I love the companionship, input and inspiration, I felt like I needed to find a pathway on my own - I have spent precious time in my studio, just moodling as is quoted from Brenda Ueland* in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way - hoping that something interesting or engaging would emerge and take hold so I could fly into a fresh and unique direction. There were some beginnings, some promising that I hope to get back to, a few that flapped and failed... I haven't posted much about my painting endeavours this year, feeling strangely reticent about exposing them to the world in this time of prolific online sharing - even the ever positive and encouraging one that my generous blog readers and friends provide. I'll get braver and back to it sometime!

An idyllic moment on our Cape holiday sitting beside the sea with an old friend, sploshing watercolour around

And so into the New Year... big changes are in the air for me and mine which I hope to record here as they happen. For this reason I'm not making any plans, aims or resolutions as they will very likely all go for a loop (which is what they normally do anyway so no diffs there!)
I wish every one of you reading this, a very healthy, happy and creatively productive year. Let's hope the news globally and locally, wherever you are, is better than last year's.
May the good guys win and the light shine through! Happy 2016!


*So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering - Brenda Ueland. (I used to be VERY good at this, but motherhood and other responsibilities made me pull up my bootstrings and get more organised - perhaps to the detriment of my art.)

Pre-Christmas in Cape Town

My husband and I spent the ten days before Christmas on a busy holiday in the Cape. Originally from Cape Town, we always have lots of people to see and things to do and I had to grab the few moments I could to sketch here and there. In a shopping centre while waiting at a café I felt sorry for Father Christmas across from me in his red suit and fur on a hot, hot day - he stayed cheerful though as he chatted for ages to an old friend. A proud dad with his blonde, barefoot daughters waited for the photographer to arrive - and as I sketched a tiny boy chatting to Santa, their hands shot up in a high five which I had to catch in spite of a funny-looking arm!

Another chance to sketch when my husband needed to find a TV to watch the Sevens Rugby Final - at Forries pub, an old student haunt of ours still going strong in Newlands. It was rather quiet until a group of five couples arrived. The women ordered wine, getting more and more raucous as the level of the bottle dropped, while their men sat doggedly ignoring them with eyes fixed on the screen above. 

And a peaceful moment at beautiful Kirstenbosch Gardens where we followed the shade on another sweltering day and I drew the tame guinea fowl who ignored us as we sat on the bench next to them. More to come from this Cape break in another post or two...

The War Museum and a Park

Skipping around from one thing to another, I returned to some urban sketching after rather a dry year... I just didn't get out much. I met up with friend and ex-Joburg Sketcher Barbara Moore at the Museum of Military History on Sunday and we sketched and nattered in the shadiest courtyard we could find on a scorching heat-wavy day - we've had too many of those! We quite logically thought the red and blue zigzags on the flag were W's and M's for War Museum, but my husband, who was a Gunner in his long ago National Service, recognised it later as the Gunner's or Artillery flag!

On Tuesday the Joburg Sketchers were supposed to meet with art counsellors from Lefika and children from Hillbrow to draw and paint together on World Aids Day in the beautifully treed Pieter Roos Park near the city. Only two of us made it there - Leonora and I looked around and listened for kid's voices but no sign of them, so we sat up at the top and started sketching the Hillbrow Tower overlooking the park, feeling out of place among rather a lot of unemployed men sitting about (actually the men with guitar in the middle sketch were from another sketch day in Newtown, but I had such a big empty page around them, I drew the park scene as if it were background, they could just as well have been there... and seeing it's confession time, I didn't fit the top of the tower onto my page so drew it alongside and photoshopped it to the top afterwards, as you can probably tell!)
As we packed up to leave in time to avoid heavy afternoon traffic, we spotted the Lefika group down at the bottom of the hill, just stopping for lunch - a pity our paths crossed too late in the day, I hope we can get together some other time.

The Old Post Office

Sketches from a few weeks ago when I went to an art exhibition in an old building that used to house Johannesburg's Post Office processing site. Enormous sorting sheds where trains and buses would offload piles of mail, buildings that used to be stables for the P.O. horses, strange machines whose purpose is a mystery (to me anyway). This all hidden behind walls that I've driven past so many times and vaguely wondered if there was anything interesting behind them. We went back to draw before it's all changed - the City Library still uses some of the premises for storage but loft apartments are in the planning stage for others.

In the meantime, Summer has arrived! Gardens are buzzing, jacarandas are in their full purple magnificence, birds and frogs are calling and swimming pools are sparkling in an early heat wave. Why is it that enormous mountains of work - absent and leaving me twiddling my thumbs all through the winter months, when sitting in a sunspot and ploughing through it would be an appealing alternative to sitting on icy windswept pavements - suddenly arrives in truckloads, just when all my urges are telling me to go outside and paint, sketch, experience. Moan, moan, moan and I shouldn't when work is often hard to come by, but really...

Shark Party

One of my great-nephews had his fourth 'Shark' themed birthday party last week (still not quite keeping up). That means three years since I did this post on his first birthday party... I'm not sure why I haven't sketched at any of his older brother's birthday parties, possibly just too much to take in and put on a page. At least at this one, they were more or less contained in a swimming pool for some of the time! It seemed appropriate to colour my quick pen sketch with children's felt tip markers... I should have got there earlier to draw the terrific food table with sharky birthday cake, watermelon bowl, brownies with fins etc - they didn't last long after the little guests arrived!

I recently added a Search widget to A Sketch in Time... why didn't I do that years ago? Within seconds I found all references to "birthday party", and the other day when I wanted to remind myself how to make a home-made scraperboard - pop - there it was. I sometimes despair of ever keeping up with all the techie stuff available, but this one was worth the head-scratching!

Storms (again) at Common Ground

When sketching last September at the Spring Day in Killarney Park, I met a funky young guy, Dokter Skruph, who had a stall there. I was interested in a little folding stool he was selling, and he was interested in my sketches - anyway, to cut a long story short, he emailed and invited me (and any Joburg Sketchers who would like to) to come and sketch on Saturday at the Seven Sounds concert. Now, this is not the kind of event I go to ordinarily... way too old, sedate and home-bound to go so far out of my comfort zone to listen to music that I felt sure I wouldn't appreciate... but, although none of the other sketchers could make it, one daughter was keen to go and promised to sketch too, so we ventured forth with our GPS into the network of highways and back-roads to find this new Common Ground venue in the Maboneng District.

Inside the park from the unfamiliar streets, we found a little patch of grass under an olive tree, shaded from baking sun and the glare of a cloudless blue sky. There were only a few people in so early to watch opening musician Matthew Mole. I needn't have worried - the music from here on was all wonderful and totally easy to love.

 I spotted Dokter Skruph sitting in the hatch of his shop chatting to friends and drew them - a thank you for the invitation as well as the first time I've had a chance to sketch an actual spaza shop, a ubiquitous and typical feature of the South African urban landscape. I hardly noticed it was clouding over...

...until I began on my next scene during the lovely sounds of Shotgun Tori - the smudges and spatters on this one were pitter-patter raindrops and just as The Muffinz, fresh from the Apollo in New York, started their set, the skies opened and Joburg threw down one of her famous, no holds barred thunderstorms which had everyone scuttling for shelter.

After a while the sun and a few determined people started emerging from their cover - here some of the musicians (Tidal Waves, I believe) on the roof with a huge mural of Nelson Mandela in his boxing days on a building behind them, waiting to see if they were going to be able to go on or not.

   And the audience trickled back with their hessian bag cushions, to wait in hope for the music to start again... which it did, with so cool Guy Buttery setting up a smaller, more movable stage in the middle of the arena to play his astonishing acoustic music on guitar, saw (the woodworking kind) and umm...something that I'm not sure of...a sitar? Before Eskom cut the power and the harassed but well prepared organisers dashed to start up a generator to finish the concert. At which point I had to go, to find my way home before any more storms or darkness fell - but I will be back to listen to more wonderful music (I missed out on a whole lot more - my daughter had found friends and stayed longer) and naturally, sketch.