West Coast Wishes

This will be my last post of 2010. For me it was a lovely year with many West Coast paintings sold both locally and all over the world, thanks to the Internet.

To wish you well, I am using a framed effect I made in watercolours, containing our most popular images: the boats, the cottages, fisher folks, a gull and a delicious pot of mussels!

Diamonds on the West Coast

Diamonds, like all other products, have been given to man to utilize and create jobs. If you are not into the romantic side of these blingy bits, consider that they are also very useful in industry because of their hardness and strength.

I found these lovely colourful diamond trawlers at Lambert's Bay, the best area for maritime diamond mining. This industry has only been commercially viable since the 1990's. Seabed crawlers can be remote controlled but mostly divers are needed. These divers, who can only work about six days per month because of our famous stormy waters, have to work in the cold of the Atlantic Ocean for up to 8 hours. When they spot diamond-bearing gravel on the seabed they direct the suction hoses towards it.

The gravel is then pumped onto sorting tables. When the boats return, the diamonds are taken ashore. What I loved about this scene was the hollow hoses floating on top the water, providing seating for hundreds of Cape Cormorants.

Purple Ragwort (Senecio arenarius)

I am painting the last of the purple ragwort flowers of the season! Because I water my garden twice a week some of them survived a bit longer.

Ragwort make a wonderful display in springtime, colouring the fields around us to a purple landscape. The flowers are pretty but poisonous to humans and livestock as it is said to affect the liver. Yet my beloved voles, which I painted a few months ago, are vegetarians and find ragwort such a treat. It is just too cute to see the flowers in those little hand-like paws! I have found that if you move past a window or stir a curtain the voles are gone! They are extremely sensitive. Maybe the early morning sun blinded them a little this morning, so I stood behind the glass and got the photos I have been yearning for. I hope to invest in a telephoto lens for my camera, to catch some better shots in future. In the meantime I present Mr and Mrs Vole eating their purple ragwort breakfast.

I also paint these purple flowers to celebrate my brand-new purple blogspot : French Belles by Marie Theron.

Happy Thanksgiving

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A year has passed and again I break away from the West Coast theme to wish my American children and friends Happy Thanksgiving. My daughter Helen in Texas is cooking up a storm for her family and friends. I enjoyed Thanksgiving so much when I was there in November 2000. Ah, the yams oven-baked with layers of apples in between really complemented the turkey! Spending very little on "props and flowers", she always creates a most beautiful table setting. Yesterday she told me: " Mom, we embrace this holiday, because there are always so much to be thankful for!"

The friends I want to send these wishes to are the few I know in person and the many kind people I have met and chatted with in the blogging world and the social media. I include the over 1600 secret and very silent US people who have visited my blog the last eighteen months. Enjoy, everyone!

This painting of a very South African-looking pumpkin farm is part of about 10 paintings I made when I was still planning my blog, then of course I decided on another formula of smaller and historically correct works. So these paintings have not been framed or exhibited. They fit nowhere in my oevre, but Mitzy the Maltese thinks that they do give some colour to her corner!

Darling Angels

We could not believe that such a day was possible in the middle of summer: cold, wet, windy, the Full CapeTreatment! But, it was the day of the opening of the "Angels" Exhibition in our closest little town, Darling. I thought I would say very little (only this: The glass of Ormonde wine was very welcome!) and rather show lots of photos of the work of my closest artist friends and myself. My own contribution was two very sweet angels, first and second photos and one serious one. There is also a photo of the Mantis Art Gallery where it was held.

I need to say more of my serious angel. I saw this image as a large sculpture in Budapest when I had a solo exhibition there. It was midday and my photo showed a shadow so dark, it looked like a sharp gash through the sculpture. I loved the idea of going against all the rules in art to show a very strong vertical like that through the painting. It can resemble a Cross....and with it some inner emotion and loneliness.

For this exhibition we concentrated on small 8x8 affordable artworks, so the images are going at really good prices.

The Fiscal Shrike

I took a photo of the lovely program for the Slice of Life Exhibition. How neat the gallery looks! This show with it's mass of even-sized paintings will run until the 21st of January 2011. I hope to receive some news about my set of birds! I could have painted 5 gannets and 5 of seagulls, but am so fond of sets of four, that I filled the remaining two blocks with something different. So here is the image of my little shrike.

As you know, there are no trees here on the West C0ast, so all the small birds around here perch themselves on top of the bushes that we call "fynbos". The fiscal shrike is such a cute round little creature as he scans the world all around for insects. I have never came upon a fiscal shrike larder here, but as a child we had a barbed wire fence and my dad would call us every time he found a larder....oh my, what a grizzly experience this was for a little girl!!! But I never missed a chance to see crickets, worms and grasshoppers impaled on pieces of barbed wire, left there to dry in the breeze like our fisherman do with the snoek and bokkoms!

Do you know the Fiscal Shrike? It lives all over our country, but this little one was only a few meters from the ocean.

Chincherinchees (Ornithogalum thyrsoides)

Enough about the exhibition, I say. It will be open until 21 st January 2011 and I will let you know what happens. Today with the end of the wildflower season in sight, I want to tell you about the flowers you probably know as "chinks". Summer is getting warmer and all over the fields they are drying off.

The Greeks, and some sources say the Romans, would describe something that was amazing, incredible and wonderful as "birds milk" which in translation would be ornis + gala. From there the scientific name Ornithogalum. Afrikaans speaking South Africans heard a ching sound when picking at the stems and that gave us the common name Chincherinchees.

You know by now that Kabeljoubank where I live is absolutely steeped in history and culture. Here the British Peer and her crew perished in 1896, and we still see pieces of their red bricks ballast, rounded by ocean movement to the size of pebbles. Here, also, if people will look where I direct them, the process of snoek drying in the seabreeze can be seen.

But this is the nicest Kabeljoubank story of all: Between the two world wars, tourists who had travelled to Cape Town by ocean liner or train, would sometimes in spring and early summer hire a horse cart and travel the distance to Kabeljoubank for a picnic. They admired the beautiful views, the bluest ocean, the fields of spring flowers. One of the sights they saw was the picking of chincherinchees (in bud form) to be exported to Covent Garden where they were sold, a popular flower which lasts for weeks in a vase.

Of course my vases at home have nothing of the sort, as all our flowers in the Cape Flower Kingdom are protected! To be admired, photographed, sketched, but never to be picked! The first image is my painting, the second the veld next to my studio, then a bunch I photographed at the annual Wild Flower Show and lastly a little macro photo I took. Do not forget to let me know if you have ever seen or grown "chinks"!