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When you don’t need an answer, there’ll be days like this...Van Morrison
Its Easter already and summer draws to a close. All over our beloved land, people are getting the last of the sun-laden days as the light throws longer and deeper shadows. In a day or two the rain will cascade gently down, signalling the start of the dreaded Cape winter. So if you have the good fortune to live close to a beach, why wouldn’t you grab your painting gear and give it a go? Avoiding the crowds on Grotto beach, I sneak off to a secret cove nearby. I’m teaching myself to be a plein-air painter, not with much success. But if you go through the motions enough, something is bound to happen, right? I also have Project Cleo underway. That is, I’m training a six-month-old pup to be an artist’s dog. Following after Lulu, the mighty Africanis, who left us in 2023, Cleo has big shoes to fill.
Cleo as an artist’s dog should be: restfully guarding the easel.
It only takes an hour or two of manic activity for Cleo to settle into this role. She greets and plays with everyone, but hey, she’s a teenager. Disapproving looks are often cast my way as she heads off down the beach to taunt other dogs and steal children’s playthings. While painting at the secret cove, she casually went for a walk to Voelklip with complete strangers. Then she launched herself into the surf in a failed attempt to get at some gulls sitting on the rocks. I pictured myself waist-deep in the icy waters, dragging her out. Generally though, it’s a win for both of us as she gets to have a good romp while I do a bit of distracted daubing.
The gear I bring with me has to be as light and portable as possible : aluminium camera tripod, five tubes of paint, a small 6 x 8 inch canvas panel and a small bottle of linseed oil. All set up and ready to paint, I found that I was lighter than I wanted- I’d forgotten my brushes. There was a palette knife at the bottom of the bag, and I proceeded to lather on the paint as if I was mini Frank Auerbach. By accident I was now avoiding my usual vice of using the small brush way too early. Once back in the studio, I added a touch here and there, trying not to kill the spontaneity of the first marks. Now I have something to look at. In the life of an artist, there are very few giant leaps or great breakthroughs. It is a slow, varying, incremental journey, by no means guaranteed to succeed. Each painting poses a new set of questions. Van Morrison is onto something there – why not give up the need for an answer? Just get into the sunlight and enjoy the process. On days like this.
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?
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.
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….
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.
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!
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.
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.
In country music there is always someone walking the line, as my friend Richard Smith observed. Bob Dylan wrote a song about it and so of course did Johnny Cash. The line your blogger is walking right now runs from his studio straight through to September 8th, the date of his first Cape Town exhibition. The travels with Pierneef are now mainly in the confines of the studio as the brush meanders back and forth covering its tracks and time skids away. Small sketches proliferate in an attempt to pin down ideas for paintings. They help to quell the rising tide of panic.
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Note for a Hermanus site painting
I’m doing a biggish oil of the Hermanus site – it consists of seven small images. After three days I had three small images in place. Like a happy construction manager I was even figuring how many more hours it would be before the painting was done. But by day four, things suddenly started to look wrong. The canvas was cluttered and kind of formulaic in its intention. The thing that Hemingway called the “crap detector” was starting to ring, and I had to press the Delete button. Day one, two and three’s efforts were painted over. Day four’s too. It wasn’t their fault. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I’m giving one of them a second life:
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the virtual fishing party
The saying “to walk the line” originates in the American Midwest. In the days of railway construction, parched and hungry construction workers would walk the line for miles, checking that all the beams were in place. Ahem. Your crap detector should be warming up now. I have no idea where it comes from. But it’s a good way of describing the need to make aesthetic or other judgement calls. And I’ll let you know how the big one turns out…
looking for the line...
Pierneef’s depopulated harbour in the 1920s:
Gutting those fish.
A regular hive of activity. OK. So maybe he did the drawing on a Sunday morning when everyone was in church. Today the action is above the harbour, the Euro and $ the catch. (note trained tracker dogs sniffing for Euro’s)
Op soek na die Euro
The harbour from above: Pierneef took his view sitting near the milkwood on the right. The rocky overhang below that is also a great place to draw from. My friend Harry Kalmer didn’t like the soporific watercolours I did down there – he said I needed to get back to Joburg!
overlooking the harbour
Pierneef may have chosen the old harbour site to please his patron, but by 1930, Hermanus was already a famous fishing paradise. This was largely due to the exploits of one Bill Selkirk, who, after a five and half hour battle from the rocks at Gearing’s Point, landed a 987kg shark:
Selkirk and shark
The London Illustrated News devoted a double page spread to this in 1928. The De Wets Huis Photo Museum has many other pics of fishermen and their “trophies”. But by today’s standards these examples of manly virtue may look like accomplices to a crime: We no longer subscribe to the idea of killing animals as “sport.” And there are hardly any fish to be had.
Giant Ray
Giant Ray and Boy . Watercolour 22 x 17cm .2009
Pierneef started work on the Station Panels in 1929. The General Manager of the SA Railways and Harbours was Sir William Hoy. For years he spent his annual vacation at the Marine Hotel in Hermanus, where he took the good air and fished.
Fishing with Sir and Lady Hoy
The Old Harbour was under the jurisdiction of the SAR&H, and this could explain why Pierneef chose to include it as one of the Panels. Sir William may have enjoyed the artistic rendering of his retirement town. (Did JHP stay with him when he was in Hermanus? Did they share a bottle of port?) But he may not have relished the prospect of more tourists: He vetoed a railway line from Caledon to Hermanus. The station had already been built in 1912.
The station that never saw a train
Not Valentines day, but Nineteenth Century Romanticism. The Romantic painters responded to the industrial age by looking for the sublime in Nature, a quest that was both aesthetic and spiritual. And even well into the C19th, when the Impressionists were drenching themselves in sunlight, the gloomy Northern Romantic tradition continued. (It’s been argued that Pierneef belongs to this current in European painting.)
I chose to show the harbour buildings overwhelmed by the magnitude of an Atlantic storm: A very Romantic idea.
Old Harbour, Hermanus.
Oil on canvas.60cm x 170cm.2009
Pierneef’s woodcut of the Hermanus old harbour. His graphic output – woodcuts and linocuts – was huge, and all of it of very high quality.
old harbour, woodcut. c1931
See my post Down South (below) for a look at his painting of the same. It still looks like this – except for the boats which were washed away in a storm in 2008. And even though the camera tells us the buildings are much smaller, this is far more ‘realistic’. Perhaps it reinforces what we choose to remember? Or reassures us that we are imposing ourselves on Nature?
Hermanus – my home town for the last two years – is the southernmost site.
Two things strike me about about this panel: He made the buildings look a lot larger than they are, and the total absence of the human figure. In those days the harbour was a hive of fishing activity. The photographic museum nearby has great pics from those days of trophy fishermen alongside their monsters from the deep. Now, sadly, you’d be hard pressed to find fish in Walker Bay. Except of course for whales. Which aren’t supposed to be fish….
Hermanus
Cape summer hues: Those what-colour-is-that grey greens of the Cape mountains in summer. And the ubiquitous mauve. Pierneef got those mountains in the background dead right.
Travels with Pierneef 