It is good to be back!

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Every year our beloved West Coast seems to get more and more popular. The R27 can become so congested that it is hard to get onto that road when we need to. Locals just burrow in and stay put, but we decided to go away this year. So 5000km by car, many sights in this lovely country, and many visits and adventures later, I am back! I enjoyed the Waterberg area tremendously and that is where I got bitten by a tick! (News travel fast and I sincerely thank everybody who wished me a speedy recovery from the tick-bite fever!) We also visited Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Durban and Plettenberg Bay. I will use one post to show some of my photos of the highlights of this tour.

Today I am surely cured and feeling well! I made two paintings this morning under which I could sign with the new date 2011. Both paintings have the elements that make up the West Coast: sky and sea, rocks and sand and fynbos. We have magical summer days at the moment, it is good to be back!

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Happy Thanksgiving

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A year has passed and again I break away from the West Coast theme to wish my American children and friends Happy Thanksgiving. My daughter Helen in Texas is cooking up a storm for her family and friends. I enjoyed Thanksgiving so much when I was there in November 2000. Ah, the yams oven-baked with layers of apples in between really complemented the turkey! Spending very little on "props and flowers", she always creates a most beautiful table setting. Yesterday she told me: " Mom, we embrace this holiday, because there are always so much to be thankful for!"

The friends I want to send these wishes to are the few I know in person and the many kind people I have met and chatted with in the blogging world and the social media. I include the over 1600 secret and very silent US people who have visited my blog the last eighteen months. Enjoy, everyone!

This painting of a very South African-looking pumpkin farm is part of about 10 paintings I made when I was still planning my blog, then of course I decided on another formula of smaller and historically correct works. So these paintings have not been framed or exhibited. They fit nowhere in my oevre, but Mitzy the Maltese thinks that they do give some colour to her corner!

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A Slice of Life Exhibition

After all the anticipation to attend the opening, the day of week, the time of day and the great distance prevented me from attending the opening of the exhibition. Avril who owns the gallery wrote so well about it on the morning after that I am going to quote him here: " Difficult to describe unique events like these. Crazy, ridiculous, exciting, enjoyable, all at the same time. Maybe "memorable" is a fair description. Many, many guests and few serious problems. One of those events one has to attend to really appreciate.

Since the gallery opened for business on 20 September 2007 I always wanted to do a real "opening", where the paintings are "unveiled". And this was the golden opportunity to do it. Imagine the curtains coming down and 600 paintings becoming fully visible all at once. I enjoyed the exercise, and according to all accounts most guests did!

In my photos this week I show my works together, followed by all my seagull paintings.

Living here next to the coast, I can see a lot of individualism in the seagulls. The leaders, the lookouts, the extremely young and the old and overweight birds all represent themselves...Again I "humanize" them, which I cannot help. Look at the gull I was able to get very close to....he really thought the rope was a safeguard against an approaching human. Then there is the group who seems to wait for a signal from their leader, something like: On your marks, get set, GO!

Enjoy these photos!

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The West Coast at Springtime

I have been working on 10 paintings for an exhibition and finished the last one yesterday! They are all West Coast themes and meant for an invited show of 63 artists each doing 10 paintings of the popular 8 x 8 size. "A SLICE of LIFE "Exhibition will show all 630 paintings on one gallery wall!

Before I start blogging and chatting about these completed works, I would love to show my favourite photos of the coastal flower displays not far from my home during Springtime.

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Gardening on the West Coast

In planning a West Coast garden, I decided to take my cue from the surrounding veld. There are no trees in the pristine fynbos, so I did not plant any. This is not a coast of waving palm trees and huge tall plants, and I often see people planting them because they love trees/want shade/want birds/need something tall as a focal point, or for whatever reason. But surely one would then attract the wrong sort of birds, because our Cape Robins, Francolins and Black Oystercatchers sleep on the ground or in low vegetation.

Another rule would be to have no flowers that will start spreading into the fynbos. Nasturtiums are a no-no! I plant so that there is always a great display of colour. This is a long narrow garden and I want colour as far as the eye can see. By not trimming and allowing plants to grow together there are never any weeds as there is no room for them. Because of harsh rainless summers you need plants that do not need a lot of water. We are planning to make some "green" plans this year to water the patch of lawn.

In the photos you will notice that I allow the wild pelargoniums, sorrel, watsonias, Livingstone daisies (bokbaai vygies), all types of aloes and ragwort to grow where they want to. I make no division between wild and cultivated plants.

My garden has been photographed by many people who can see it over the walls, and are thrilled by all the colour! This is a garden where I spend about 4 days working in a year, while the buffalo grass grows vertical and needs trimming about every third week only.

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Fear of Flying?

This post comes to you from Pretoria where my West Coast exhibition takes place this week. The last week before leaving I painted enough gannets, photographed them and put them on disc. How easy it is to put your work in your purse nowadays. The same cannot be said of all the paintings we hauled up here!

The time watching the gannets from the bird hide on Bird Island at Lambert's Bay was one of the most exciting times of my life. One can never get enough of that lovely mass of soft yellow heads, interspersed with the black Pacman-like, feature-less baby gannets! Soon, however, I started focussing on the spectacle of their flying.

The soil where they trample around is very hard, and they have a strip that they use for taking off, with many bodies actually walking through it. So to find a clear few yards to run before rising from the ground is difficult. Again and again they try, lose courage or halt to avoid a wanderer in their way and go back to try again. Flap-flap goes the feet designed for swimming over the hard crusty earth. I promise you that an onlooker can become utterly nervous! The eventual take-off is not very smooth but quite faltering!

On the edges, where the rocks are, others peek over the precipice before throwing themselves into the air. There are akward moments when they almost hang in the air, trying to find the proper movements. As if my readers are not upset enough by this time, I also have to tell you that the landings on those enormous feet looks like a great plopping down! I was saddened but not surprised to read in Nelson's book on seabirds that some gannets can injure or kill themselves in flying accidents! Here, close to the earth they have their worst close shaves with danger.

But of course, what takes place in the first moments of alighting is absolutely forgotten the moment they stretch out in the air, and form a single line from beak to tail, while the wings unfold to an enormous, finely tipped wingspan. Here are the most gracious and effective of flyers who are able to divebomb the sea at such a speed that it carries them down a full ten meters to a supply of fish who never saw it coming! Yeah, for the gannets, can you feel the relief and freedom of those flyers as they do the auronautical tricks they were born for.

Working here on a granddaughters's computer, my images won't download from that disc. I will post and try to rectify the matter soon.

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Folks and Fish # 1

This is the first painting of a set of four works, of which I have shown the preparatory sketches in the previous post. Working at them I am conscious of the poverty of the area and the plight of those brave souls, the sustenance fishermen, who face the sea day by day.

My model shows two of the four crayfish he is allowed to catch for his daily quota during the crayfish season. It will be safer for the men to catch the monthly allowance in one single day, and not face the sea so often, but unfortunately such a system will be difficult to control. (Crayfish can become very scarce and must be protected.)

Crayfish holes are marked by experienced fishermen, who will put on diving suits and retrieve their quota. Older people and non-swimmers can catch theirs by netting from the quay that conveniently projects into the sea like it does at Yzerfontein. Everybody keeps a measure handy as undersized specimens must be returned to the sea immediately.

We usually buy crayfish in Velddrif when they are in season and available, so I decided to use the harbour at Velddrif as a background for the painting. New visitors can read more about crayfish on the West Coast in my post: Crayfish Coast.

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Our voles are just too cute!

Rodents are rodents? No, definitely not, I have promised to stand in the way of anybody trying to disturb the bush where my nearest little voles live. They live in bushes where they make tunnels. These bushes are part of the original fynbos of the West Coast, and not something we planted here. Of course these clever animals think ahead and love multiple exits. Strangely enough the little Cape Robins seem to share these tunnels with them, as they are in and out, "visiting" or maybe "boarding" as there are no trees for birds on the coast. Something else I have noticed about their "buildings": like the ancients in Crete and Athens, the entrances face East!

Voles are extremely shy and will not enter the house. I have the greatest problem taking photographs. They love sitting in front of their tunnels in the winter morning sun, but scatter if you as much as pass by a window inside. A vole is stouter in body than a mouse and also much larger. Voles have shorter tails and bigger ears. I am sure Beatrix Potter would have been enchanted to see them and would have made up little characters!

I needed depth for this painting and painted the background in watercolour over which I then glazed a layer of thinned down white acrylic. The vole and foreground was done in acrylics.

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Rock Solid!

I will not describe our Cape introduction-to-winter weather! Suffice to say it is known as The Cape of Storms/Cabo des Tormentos! I do not venture far out on the West Coast and rather paint the scenes that are close by. This very square old rock thrones over many low rows of jagged serrated points. I see it every time I can get my lazybones out of bed to take a beach walk.

After doing the painting, I found among my photos of the last five years many different images. There it stands, darkish, split into three layers so very long ago! The side that is always facing the sun looks as if it has been bleached a lighter colour. Over the top and down the sides, like icing, runs the white lines of calcified guano left by the visiting local seagulls and black cormorants.

The scene changes. Birds come and go, the tide ebbs and flows, the mists come down and lift again, but it sits there proudly, patiently! I think I will name this painting: "Rock Solid".

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