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.

Hello, Velddrif

Jetties at Velddrif 2012  30x14 inches Oil on canvas SOLD

Velddrif is probably one of the smallest towns on the West Coast. Although it lies on the beautiful Berg River, it has never been developed into a resort. Many, many times, I send up this prayer of thanks that Velddrif is undeveloped and the river untouched by fancy marinas! Tour the country and there are surely a lot of beauty in the Waterfront, Sedgefield and Knysna developments, those picture-pretty resorts! Those places are easy on the eye and has a vibe caused by lots of happy people moving around, so I am not shooting it down. But......

But for me, this is the place where one feels alive. I walk on that dusty dirt road called Bokkom Lane, and breath in the smelly little fish. I look at the bokkoms, some still a glistening silver colour, others already dried and golden and I read a people's history in them. I stroll around admiring the cunning of the seagulls, grinning at the names on the "bakkies", as the little boats are called. I may sit on a veranda and sip something, but soon I would be clambering over unsteady little jetties again. Hungry? Surely for me there is only one thing to eat at Velddrif: "grilled harders", the same little fish that are used for bokkoms! I miss how my husband used to go to the kitchen, meet the cook, and tell him how to prepare my harders.

The painting was made more than a year ago, in happy times next to the river and later in the studio at home. I think I have captured the water well here. I did not like my painting then. With my husband so ill there was not much that I liked about my art, and it was truly buried beneath a pile of stuff for about 15 months. But as is goes with clients, they ignore the wall displays and would rather scratch around in my studio. So this painting was rediscovered and sold. I must go down to Velddrif again.

Karen Van Niekerk, one of the early risers in Velddrif and a professional photograper, took the wonderful images of the river.

 The first heading on the right side of my blog is: Search this blog. There you can type in "Velddrif "or "Berg River" or "Bokkom Lane" if you want to read my older posts on this theme and see previous Velddrif paintings.

Daydreaming on the Berg River

Like children everywhere, the local West Coast children must get their education. But

as this little man admires a newly painted boat, his thoughts are with the real men on the deep ocean. He imagines himself pulling out a heavy net brimful of the little mullet, a plentiful fish which assures that nobody will grow hungry. He wants to stay here, work the ocean and keep a happy home full of laughter and song!

Sadly for him, the opportunities to work in and on the West Coast are not plenty as the rules and quotas for fishing become more severe.

Regular readers of my blog will recognize this scene as one of the many private jetties off Bokkom Lane near Velddrif. Being an admirer of the work of Catherine Jeffrey, I made sure of putting down the tonal values first. Once that was done, the completion was much too fast, but I will leave it at that and see how the next painting turns out.

Some happy landmarks this week: I passed 3000 unique South African visitors and 2000 Americans as well as a total of over 19000 hits.(click on Pageviews on my flag panel to see this) My blog's second birthday is 20 days away. By the way, South Africans, who are you? You are welcome to make appointments to visit my studio, seriously!!! A few people have done that and we had a super time!

Bokkom Lane

A row of quaint old buildings meanders along on the bank of the beautiful pristine blue Berg River. A developer with a sharp business eye might think "aha" and see visions of malls and playgrounds. Luckily for us, this little lane is strictly protected and regarded as a national treasure. The street had looked like this for hundreds of years and will continue to be the place where a age-old custom of drying sardines is still practiced.

I have blogged extensively about Velddrif and its bokkoms, and new readers may want to catch up, so I will lead you there: On the first anniversary of my blog, I showed the photogenic little fish in Bokkoms at Velddrif. I then showed the dried product and how I personally enjoyed my bokkoms in Bokkoms turning from Silver to Gold. As part of a set of four paintings for an architect's beach home, I also showed characterful Janine who worked at one of the factories in my post called Folks and Fish #3

My current painting shows part of the dirt road with little bokkom factory-shops. I show 4 tourists, but on a normal day that will be 3 too many! More people should become interested in the old customs and try to enjoy the living history of the West Coast!

Folks and Fish #3

Of course we have already learnt a lot about the bokkom industry on the West Coast. First I painted a little row of bokkoms being salted and hung out to dry. Then the second stage was shown where they were peeled and made ready to be eaten.(Remember my homemade bread, apricot preserve and slivers of salty bokkoms served with coffee?)

This painting, third in the set "Folks and Fish", shows the largest of the bokkom drying barns on the banks of the Berg River at Velddrif where thousands of little mullet fish can be seen any day of the week. The bokkoms take 8 days to dry, depending on the weather and air circulation Janine is the petite lady who has managed this factory with its large salt bins and many hanging lathes for more than 12 years. This quietly dignified lady had me spellbound as she pointed out the many aspects of this industry which provides both jobs and food for the local people.

It would be easy to export the dry snacks with their sweet fishy smell or even introduce them to Johannesburg and other South African cities. But of course, it is a born and bred local taste that takes a bit of getting used to. As Janine stands there with her old-fashioned set of scales, she probably sees the same customers day by day.

Bokkoms: Turning from Silver to Gold

As the little fish dry out they become thin, papery and have a rich golden hue. In my painting I show some people deftly gutting and skinning the fish. It is good to watch them for a while as you can then have a few bokkoms weighed out and clean them yourself at home. The meaty part is then cut into tiny strips. About these workers: no assembly line here as each worker makes him/herself comfortable on an upturned crate and sit either in the shade or in the sun.

Later I strolled up and down the Berg River looking at every bird, boat, bend and island in the river, and still the lady in the yellowish t-shirt concentrated on her task, never moving, maybe because the knife was very sharp. "Her back!" I thought, and tried to paint the tension in those back muscles.

So how do we eat this delicacy? No doubt, the great cooks will invent some interesting pates for us, but here on the West Coast bokkoms are either eaten as a salty snack with ice cold beer or wine, or the other way, the high calorie way, which is how I and most people prefer it: Take home-baked oven-warm white bread, plaster it with real butter, add a good dollop of sweet apricot preserve and arrange the bokkoms on top. Pour a cup of the best coffee with it. Now I know how I am going to celebrate the completion of this week's post!

Bokkoms at Velddrif (and blog's first anniversary)

The schools of fish near Velddrif have attracted people for ages! Some fish traps and shell middens dating back hundreds of years, having belonged to Khoi-Khoin (early indigenous inhabitants) are protected historical beacons. The quaint little lane next to the Berg River which is aptly named "Bokkom Lane" is considered an informal "national monument". Here, in a never-changing cycle, schools of harders are offloaded from rickety boats onto rickety jetties. First, the fish is thrown into deep salt troughs, then, still wet and glistening they are bunched and hung out to dry. The moment they are salted and stringed onto rafters they are no longer referred to as harders or mullet, but become bokkoms.

In my painting, and in the photographs you can see the first steps in the process. Bokkoms are hung out to dry. They are very beautiful and this subject is a favourite among West Coast artists. My next post I will show them dried to a golden colour. I will then explain the second part of the process and explain how to eat this local delicacy.

I mentioned in the title that this is my blog's first anniversary. When I took those bold steps, I did not know that I would make many friends, sell lots of paintings and really get hooked on blogging! I did not add my flag counter before June last year, but what fun it provides! So now I know that I had 8664 hits and 71 countries visited my blog so far and that my highest number of visitors in a day was 122. (Sport and celebrity blogs cannot compete here, please!) And in true Oscar style I want to thank my 1747 unique South African visitors, 792 very kind Americans, 99 Australians (who ARE you, I want to meet you too???), an equal number of UK people and 77 Canadians. The biggest surprise was the interest in my blog that was shown by travel websites.

Velddrif

Say the word "ocean" and my little car goes into motion, you can say it is her homing instinct! So down the mountain we rushed, leaving Piketberg behind. After that the road took us past Aurora and then straight down to Velddrif and the sea. It was not long before we spotted patches of the lovely Berg River that has its mouth at Velddrif. Calm blue water with wading birds, boats and cottages along the river shores lead us into a tranquil fishing village.

So I went for the biggest boat first. The composition was made difficult by my closeness to the scene. I refused to paint a great grey expanse of the foreground concrete jetty, and thus I landed up with a problem of balance. This is how I solved it: a lighter sky over the little town in the background, so that the eye could be drawn in, two silhoettes of seabirds and two ropes.

For the next few posts you can expect more of the things Velddrif is famous for: salt pans, wading birds, bokkoms (a type of dried mullet hanging in rows at Bokkom Lane) and of course more boats.