Back to Bokkoms

Every time I open my blog, I notice that certain West Coast topics remain the most popular of my posts, even if new visitors pop in. These are the most-visited themes: Paternoster, Langebaan, Saldanha Bay, waterblommetjies, sutherlandia plant, and bokkoms. I have moved away from the West Coast, but I kept my home there and try to return there often. It is also available for holiday accommodation.

188 Sanderling....from our  "long beach" you can see the beautiful Table Mountain.

Since I am no longer living there and travelling the west coast regularly, I have started on many new painting themes, working in sets of 15 to 25 paintings. There were the bunnies, the stitch cartoons, the impressionistic ladies and the children. And now to honour the West  Coast once again, I painted a series of bokkoms.

The full history, process and use of bokkoms were explained in earlier posts which contained these images:

Bokkoms, read about them at this link and here

I thought I would present the Berg River at Velddrif by using a clear blue for the background? Here you can see the resulting paintings.

The three makes a good set for a narrow wall!

I am just endlessly living by the slogan (first heard from one of my lecturers long ago):  NEVER BORE THE EYE.

Thus the next step was for little fish to go all modernistic and Delauney-like, this time to reflect the colours of the little boats (bakkies, we call them) which bring in the fish for drying.

There is a tradition on the river: anybody, even a child, who needs food may collect a fresh harder or two for supper from the brimful boatloads.  In this way the community is supported. “Harders” is what they are called before they are salted and dried. I love the dish and nowhere is there a better place to eat them, than correctly prepared at a Bokkom Lane restaurant on the Berg River’s banks. These are a very fast acrylic sketch and some ink sketches on canvas, depicting my favourite meal.

Facts of Flight #3 , Velddrif

This painting is the third in a 3-part series of seagulls in flight with a West Coast setting. You can see how the set looks together as it dries in the shade. These were commisioned works for a new West Coast gallery "Pêrels & Pampoene Kunsgalery / Art Gallery" in the town of Hopefield. I was happy when the gallery owner chose 10 more paintings to hang for opening night.

Velddrif lies on the beautiful blue Berg River. It is one of my sites to visit repeatedly for inspiration. Those old and unsteady jetties, the gulls and the boats are all part of a rejuvenating scene. You can see me relaxing there on one of the jetties, drinking in the ambience of an unspoilt area!

Master and Commander

A large part of the West Coast consists of farm lands and countryside. In between you will find our beloved small towns, fondly known as "dorpies". The atmosphere is rural, to say the least! I often visit Lelieblom Farm and there I have met some other farmers too. I need to see the milk farms especially because the products from Darling Dairies are well known all over the country in food stores. I also needed an excuse to paint a colourful rooster, so here it is!

The picturesque roosters at Lelieblom Farm are known to rush through the house to reach the front garden as soon as a door opens! I chose to paint this colourful red guy! In the painting I placed him in the foreground so that all else will seem small. Look at that assertive stance! As a little girl I was chased by a ferocious rooster, they do that, don't they? I call my painting "Master and Commander", because of the bossy attitude!

My West Coast Calendar and some Websites

My WEST COAST CALENDAR is now available in the year of your choice and can be ordered from RedBubble.

Here is the link, and for book readers, here is the site to find it: www.redbubble.com/people/marietheron/calendars/7661685-west-coast-chronicles. RedBubble calenders are printed on excellent paper and the images (all 13 of them) may be framed afterwards.

Here are some websites where my work can be seen:

To find my blog: http://artistmarietheron.blogspot.com

My fashion fun blog: http://frenchbelles.blogspot.com

Viewing or buying original art: www.Southafricanartists.com/home/marietheron

Calenders, cards and prints: http://marietheron.redbubble.com

Aloes in the Garden

This is the year that I will have to invest in a book on aloes, as I have just planted my 12th type. In a previous post I painted Aloe mitriformis, the wild West Coast aloes that cover the rocks near the ocean.

In the meantime my own garden grew well and the aloes grew large, and some of them became prolific. I called a large aloe with ferocious thorns "Old Buster". This year at last three fat orangey-red plumes appeared on old Buster! An occasion for a painting done in acrylics on canvas board, making use of paint brushes, toothpicks and cotton buds, all as tools for creating textures.

Aloes attract a lot of birds and you will see in my photos how birds eat down from the top, treating the aloes like corn-on-the-cob! I grabbed a few seeds to dry, and left the rest for these pretty Cape Canaries.

A Demo in Darling

We had Museum Day in Darling on Saturday, and I spent the morning demonstrating oil painting. I only had two days' warning so had little time to prepare. In my studio was a large seascape where the clouds and foreground had a rough underpainting in acrylics. It was done on a day when I wanted to put down a cold sky before I forgot what it looked like.

Behind my counter in the museum I followed the acrylic cloud shapes with oil paint, softening the edges. I showed how clouds were shaded with darker and lighter shades and how some sky colour had to be blended into the edges. I then painted the waves and used a type of very light calligraphy stroke to add lots of white foam edges to them. The rocks were then painted using only raw umber, ultramarine blue and white.

During the many years that I taught art, I have always tried to have some moments of tension to make my demo interesting. So, dipping my brush into the dirty brown colour of the rocks, I approached the wet completed sky. It took a few moments to squizzle in the seagulls and highlight them with white, but I could sense how people held their breaths as it was so easy to spoil the surface of my sky at that moment. Long hours on my feet, that I will not repeat soon, but it was wonderful to experience the company and the intelligent questions put to me by very young kids! Do children just get cleverer or what?

Cold Water, Cold Sky

Winter arrived so suddenly that I have stopped going to !Khwa Ttu until we have warmer weather again. This is what the ocean is looking like at the moment. Every day of my life I can just go outdoors and stare at it, but from one day to the next, it never looks the same.

I hope you can see the tranquil pool in the foreground where the water meets the beach.

Khwa Ttu # 4: How softly they tread!

There is no painting today but only photos. As heavy rains come down daily, accompanied by extreme cold, I stay indoors and ponder on what we know of the San.

Signs of their lives which go back thousands of years were found in this whole area stretching over Yzerfontein and Darling and at the present !Khwa Ttu. Even here where I live close to Kabeljoubank one of those mysterious rounded stones with the hole in the centre was found when the neighbours laid their foundations.

How very softly they treaded, these gentle people, the first inhabitants of the Cape! They did not excavate or build or cultivate or plant! They truly left the earth as they found it! What they needed in their daily lives was only a little food and water, and some protection for the body. My few photos show all the possessions they needed. With bow and arrow the men followed and killed buck, which they cut into pieces with flintstones. They made "Boy-scout fire" and some meat and vegs were cooked. (On the tour that I will take on a sunny day, we are going to be instructed in making a fire with two sticks, oh my, I am going to fail class!)

The women and girls collected medicinal and edible plants and roots, using the heavy stones as levers on their sticks to lift out underground tubers. The San valued water most highly and collected it underground by means of grass straws pushed down into melon-like watery roots. Water could also be stored in ostrich shells and carried around like quivers by using leather straps. All clothing and blankets were made of animal skins. The only other thing they needed was entertainment, which took place in the form of stories en-acted by the elders.

Once an area was depleted of food, the San would move away, but they were not nomads in the full sense of the word, as they would gladly settle in a good spot, like here at !Khwa Ttu, The Place of Water, with many little discoveries still in store for us... (To be continued)

!Khwa Ttu # 1: The Approach

For the next few posts I am taking you to !Khwa Ttu, a 15 minute drive from home. You may pronounce it Qwatoo, as few of us could master the clicking sound preceding the word. Here the San has dwelt many centuries ago. While people in Europe built palaces and kingdoms, ships and new world colonies, the San survived through their miraculous talents of hunting and finding food in drought-struck savannas and deserts of the Southern regions of Africa.

The approach goes though fields with a desolate feel to it, only familiar to us who were born and bred in Africa. I have tried to portray this sense of Africa in my oil painting. Even hardy fynbos was trampled by these early people and the wild animals they hunted. I am gripped by a feeling of longing as we drive towards the entrance. What stories of survival are hidden here? To be continued........

A West Coast Studio

A lovely week started with a sale of 5 paintings from my French Belles series. Those were the first sales of this year. This event was followed up with a good clean-up! I needed to re-plan my work space and decided to get all my framed works on the wall as the frames get knocked all the time when they lie around. Here are photos of the completed studio.

My large collection of History of Art books are not in this room, only practical books and art magazines. You can see the work triangle formed with two antique tables where I have a small easel for sitting down, and a large one for standing. The tables are also ideal when grandchildren visit. (Alas, they all live far away) I cover them with plastic table cloths and the kids do what they like. Old paintings get a layer of gesso and become their canvasses. I keep all my old brushes for that reason too.

The Restless Ocean - completed

This is the first painting that really gave me heart palpitations. It is both restless and restful! I drag it from room to room in my house. In some areas it looks far too bright, too turquoise, and in a different location it looks serene and calm!

For the last couple of years, I have taken the sea for granted, because every window on two sides of the house have a view. Now, I cannot pass a window without really staring. Since yesterday I have picked up a lot of detail that is NOT in this painting, but will be in the next. For instance: the white foam on the summit of the wave has a shadow of its own, like snow, it is not just white. Also, there is green in the large waves, not my soft peppermint whisper of a colour, but a ferocious darkish green. There is so much to learn!

These photos show the completed painting 1000mm x 750mm. I include some details in the post too, because the seagulls lifting up from the rocky outcrop was such a delightful detail, I had to do it well. There is variation in the colours of the photos too: too much blue sky when I shot them. Our best photos are taken on overcast days.

Work in Progress

I have started a large painting of 760mm x 1000mm. The fearsome white canvas becomes quite tame as soon as it is covered with the first layer of paint! You work different muscles with the broad sweeps of the brush, though, and my upper arm is feeling somewhat stiff at the moment.

As a theme, I decided to do a larger version of my first painting of the year, so this is once again a view of the ocean close to home. The sky looks very serene and has a lot of areal perspective, so I am satisfied with that. But the waves are much too restless. I will not even touch the rocks or birds before this ocean starts "behaving"!

The second photo shows my studio with my work triangle formed with an old table and an old yellow-wood desk.