Amaryllis Belladonna

South Africa has its high summer season in December, and the place to find bloggers and artists is mostly the kitchen as social life is at its peak and family members get together. Somewhere in the middle of hot-hot January, a guilty feeling about 'not painting' gears its head! Thus it is time to pick up where I left off!

I started the year with a soft oil painting of a typical West Coast winter rainfall flower, but mine is a "flower-gone-crazy"! Amaryllis Belladonna or March lilies are supposed to flower in February/ March. Mine chose November to appear and January to disappear. Underneath the ground those large bulbs are resting now until who-knows-when! They sure love the very dry summer and the harshest and driest part of the garden!

I picked some to put indoors and there the soft pink flowers darkened to a deeper shade. In my photo I caught some of the light shining through the fragile drying flowers, heart-breakingly lovely in their final moment! Read more about March lilies here as well as on Diana's blog Elephant's Eye.

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.

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. Read more about crayfish on the West Coast in my post: Crayfish Coast.

The African Black Oystercatcher

I have painted a pair of "tobies" flying low above the water line where they forage for food. The long orange-red bills are also used to pry oysters and mussels from between the rocks and they can push that bill right into the sand to find little fauna underneath. These birds also feed by night! African Black Oystercatchers or Haematopus moquini, called tobies in our area, mate for life, the pair remaining loyal throughout their potentially long lives of up to 35 years.

Black oystercatchers are the most precious birds on the West Coast, being on the Red Data list of seriously endangered birds with less than 5000 in the world. There is a sign at Kabeljoubank warning visitors not to disturb these birds. (visitors to these beaches and rocks are luckily very few) Tobies are not very scared if you keep your distance, and I can sit quietly about 10 meters from them for a long time.

Their nesting habits are problematic as they scratch a shallow nest into sand and sometimes line it with a few bits of shell. With only one to four eggs lying in the open, the dangers are many! The eggs can be trampled, found by dogs or grabbed by other birds and animals. It is a known fact that the conservation people who watch and count the birds will not even tell a well-meaning person where a nest can be found! Human curiosity may just lead a person to try and take a peek and later on someone's dog may follow the spoor!

The Piketberg Conebush and other Proteas

Proteas, those hardy plants native to the Western Cape, Southwest Australia, Southeast Asia, Madagascar, New Guinea and New Zealand, have been around since the days of the dinosaurs! Here in the Cape Floral Kingdom 330 species are growing against mountains and in sandy nutrient-poor soils.

Proteas are also cultivated for export around Piketberg, and in my painting I am showing Leacadendron discolor, also known as Piketberg Conebush, a native of the mountain. The leaves protecting the bright pompoms which are the real flowers, are a lovely custard yellow with a reddish tint. This composition has been planned in my studio, so to flank the conebushes I have painted in smaller proteas which are found next to the coast: Leucospernum tomentosum (Saldanha Pincushions) and Protea scolymocephala (witskollie). May I just mention that identification is extremely difficult, so if anybody does not agree with my identification, please join the discussion!

I am showing another painting, a large watercolour which I painted in 1993. Large open flowers of Protea cynaroides, South Africa's national flower are shown with the popular Protea repens which never opens completely.

Taking the Pass to the top of the Mountain

We drive right through pretty Piketberg to the Northern side where the 3-looped pass begins. One is almost immediately met by an amazing sight of hang-gliders making their slow and very colourful descent from the mountain, landing noiselessly on a soft green grassland.

For weeks over the holidays I have tried to visualise what it would be like up there on the heights of the Piketberg. It is VAST! There are so many farms up there. Some have mansions and formal gardens. Others have small cottages peeking through the vegetation. I saw former homes in ruins left to crumble away. There are protea farms and citrus farms and some tiny lavender groves and neat vineyards! The natural vegetation consists of fynbos and various protea species. On these bushy uneven lands the San reigned long ago. They were quite agile and it was difficult to find stolen cattle back once they were in their hands....thus the cannon had to sound a warning in time when they were spotted about to attack the farms in the valley.

My painting shows the view towards the town from the top where there is a place to stop and gaze back. I painted those dams and farms, (the greenest patches are vineyards), then decided to place a mistyness over all the careful detail in the distance! By now I have often painted thinned white acrylics over my work, then rubbed it off fast, so I had no fear in doing that!

I include a photo of one of the many small citrus farms on top of the Piketberg (Mountain). How absolutely wonderful it must be to live and work far above the crowds! And now on towards the tea garden half an hour's drive into the mountain!

Gathering Rain Clouds

Something we love about the West Coast is that without buildings to obstruct the view, there is a lot of sky! Three mornings ago, I looked out to see what the day would be like. Oh, oh! (to quote my grandchildren.) A bruised-looking sky held the promise of a day full of chilly spells and outpourings. For the first time on this blog, I picked up a large canvas as my usual 9 x 12 format would not be able to tell the story. This is the resulting easel painting. The mass of a neighbour's home in the lower right hand corner anchors the composition.

The Western Cape Biosphere is a Unesco protected area. The natural fynbos are kept in its pristine state. Therefore we do not plant trees, roses or anything that will spread its seeds through the fynbos. As the early morning sun catches a few cloud borders here, the abundant sprays of the wild purple pelargoniums are also highlighted.

Daisy..daisy.....

"Nothing in Nature is more beautiful than a wildflower. Every smallest one of them has grown in perfect symmetry" Asteraceae, daisies, gousblomme, whatever you prefer to call them, lead the pack of wildflowers in the Cape Floral Kingdom. Nothing at all is visible during winter. They leave you worrying: will they bloom this year? And then one sunny morning you have a blinding display which continues for about 7 weeks through August and September.

Do you remember the snoek drying on the fence at Kabeljoubank in the cooler months? This scene is also up there.... to the south is Table Mountain, to the west is the ocean. Have you noticed that old fences, wiring and gates that are no longer needed are just left where they are? I love this old gate here. It provides a focal point to the composition.

(quote in the beginning from: Dr Winifred G Wright - Natal, a Rambler's Pocket Guide)

Churning Them Out

The idea to paint some of the arum lilies brought to the studio by Karen of Lelieblom, was a good idea and it tends to relax my visitors when they watch me doing it. I was so pleased with all the comments I received after the last blog. Many interesting facts regarding these flowers came forward, especially regarding the edibility. MacTeddy dared me to try a dish made of the young leaves, suggesting that it may taste like baby spinach. Theresa from Geneva had already enjoyed a delicious dish in Japan where the stalks were used, and in Texas, 'rianreyneke' can buy a spicy filled leaf, a sort of wrap!

Arum lilies are standing thick along our roads. On a cold day like today when all the other flowers in the Cape Floral Kingdom close up, arums still stand in glorious display. The most beautiful scene year after year is seeing black/white cows lying down on top of large patches of lilies, always on a spot where it will be dangerous to stop the car for a photo!!!! After learning of the medicinal use of the flowers, I begin to suspect that cows by instinct do something good for their bodies. "I say, Daisy, shall we take The Cure this year?"

I forgot to tell you that the preferred name among Afrikaans people is the lovely-sounding 'aronskelke'. Maree mentioned in the comments that she used to have a black arum lily in her garden, and sometimes I have come across a rather sharp yellow example. I wonder, did nature produce them, like the creamy white ones here in our fields, or was man in an experimental mood?

West Coast National Park

It was still not high season for the flower display on the West Coast when I decided to enter the West Coast National Park for a drive, to experience the scenery and stop for good coffee. Odette, Odille and Oswald halted me and demanded to know exactly where I thought I was going! In case you did not know, ostriches are polygamous. Several females will lay the eggs in the same nest and make turns to keep them protected by day. At night the male will take his turn in keeping his future brood warm with his luscious plumage. The brownish-gray plumes belong to the females while the males are black&white. There are many areas in South Africa where ostriches are domesticated and used for their eggs, eggshells, plumes, meat and skin, but our ostriches live in their natural habitat in the wild and are protected.

Soon there will be hundreds of visitors per day to this reserve with its many bird species and its endless carpet of flower species, its seaviews and lagoon views. There are special birding spots, whale watching, mountain bike trails, hiking trails and picnic sites. Geelbek Restaurant in the park offers an information centre. The West Coast National Park is part of the greater West Coast Biosphere. There is a section for watersports and sailboats. The great tranquility of the Langebaan Lagoon is guaranteed by the exclusion of angling and powerboats. Mmmm, that is why it always seems like such a perfect hideout there......the only sound the lapping of the water and the gentle staccato of the cleats.