Paternoster Wedding

Anri was born on the West Coast and was fortunate as a young adult to spend five years on a farm outside Paternoster. She knew then that she would like to get married here one day. Young people almost always leave our quiet shores and Anri worked in both the Netherlands and then settled in London. Here she met Rodrigo and the dream took shape!

As I painted Anri, her feet grounded in the soil (ah, in fact it is very clean sand!) of her birthplace and her eyes on the wonderful Rodrigo, the painting started to become very symbolic. They are turned away from us, towards their future overseas. The little boat points to a distant place too. I chose very controlled colours so that everything would echo the sea, sand and sky. Don't you just love the eye contact of the couple, fingers entwined and the groom's pants gamely rolled up?And of course, that lovely dress that leaves us speechless!

My thanks to West Coast photographer MARIÉ MALHERBE for the use of some of her material for the painting and for the photo I have reproduced here.

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The Bride and the Sea

Strandkombuis at Yzerfontein on the West Coast, is renown for beautiful weddings. No wonder! Yzerfontein has many acres of pristine white beach. A wedding can take place on the sand, maybe in the 'long-shadows-hour', shortly before sunset. And afterwards in the disappearing light, guests can enter the beach shelter for a feast to remember!

A lovely venue! Now add a striking bride! Melissa Madore, a tall, dark-haired French-Canadian beauty, met Tiaan, a South African who has spent much of his youth in Europe, when they were both lecturing in Taiwan. Melissa came to live in South Africa for a year - it became five years! Where to get married? Being such seasoned travellers, they had plans to marry in Kenya where they once had a holiday. Not very practical if you have to transport all your guests including Tiaan's newly-born nephew over there!

In Melissa's own words: "I still very much wanted a beach wedding. Then we looked at Strandkombuis and we both fell on our knees, thinking: 'This is it! This is the place!' "

All the guests, including the bridegroom and his best man, wore white. The chairs had white cotton dust covers and a white tent-type shelter with a flower-covered arch was ready for the ceremony. Then Melissa appeared in a sensational dark blue dress with lots of frothy white lace echoing the sea and the foamy waves. Striking and original! I did not want to paint the wedding photographs and used three different photos to work out a composition where the bride looks down onto the scene from the dunes higher up.

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West Coast Icons

These little boats, donkey's years old, rest at the entrance of Strandlopertjie in Langebaan. This is a very popular lunch venue where guests sit on large round boulders or underneath a shelter. They help themselves to lots of seafood, homebaked bread, homemade preserves ..... Informal to the extreme.

We are West Coast people and boats have iconic status. Throughout my West Coast Chronicles I will show many different types of boats. These two are probably the oldest I have seen, with not a speck of paint left on them. I will also paint the humble brightly painted fishing boats at Paternoster, the cheeky motorised fishing vessels of Yzerfontein, the peaceful sailing boats at Langebaan and the glamourous yachts alongside them. We will look at the cute tugboats of Saldanha which look like something out of Noddy. At Laaiplek we will find large fishing trawlers and then I will paint the diamond barges at Lambert's Bay. Then there may always be surprises waiting on the beach, like a boat displaced by a storm.... I hope there will be many boats I can paint along the coast!

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