Winter in the Klein Karoo. I am walking through open country, towards the Touws Rivier. The beechwood easel is slung over my shoulder and little Cleo is trotting up front. I’m heading for a small cliff that I may like to paint. It feels right, moving through the stones and scrub, with the odd cloud scudding overhead. It takes a while to settle on something – I am spoilt for choice and can’t decide. There’s no water in the river, and the riverbed is what I settle on. The view up the riverbed, with the stones and the dark shadow under that acacia tree is what catches my eye.

I clear away some of the pebbles and start to inhabit my painting space. As usual I have no real idea of how to proceed. The main thing is to get going, so after emptying the tea flask, I lay in some of the darker shapes. It’s always this: big shapes to smaller shapes, dark tones first, hang on to the bigger brushes as long as possible. I have no further method, and after an hour or so I’ll be involved in all sorts of unexpected improvisations, fending off disaster. The difficulty of this plein air thing is all too apparent in my clumsy first steps. I cling to the sense that I can get this right – with only a vague notion of what that looks like . Whilst painting I’m haunted by images I hold in my mind, by artists who are both daunting and inspiring. Obscurely, today I’m thinking about a Nineteenth Century French landscapist called Frederic Bazille. The landscape at Chailly (below) was done in in 1865. Monet, Sisley and Pisarro, amongst others, were all experimenting with plein air painting at that time, but the full – on Impressionist phase of broken brushwork was still to come.

As I paint, a cold front sneaks in from the South. The light is much more diffuse now. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s kind of different to how it was an hour ago. That dog of mine has started wandering in ever wider circles, and so is my concentration. Time to pack it in. Maybe later on in the studio I’ll be able to work it up into something acceptable…..