The Art of It

This was painted on one of those extremely exciting days of painting in the field.  Some days everything just works!

During the cold winter months we painted at Oudekraal.  What a magnificent venue, so quiet and peaceful but oh so freezing.  I don't know where summer has gone to as it is still freezing!

These are some of the views from our en plein air Tuesday morning sessions. Many paintings get recycled but every now and then there are some that I want to keep. For the moment anyway. Hout Bay Harbour is home to the famous Snoekies fish shop. Last week I bought some Kablejou there and cooked it for supper. It was the best fish I think I have ever tasted! Next week that will definately be a stop for me before going home after our usual morning painting.

Wow - I am in seventh heaven!!! I have just had the most wonderful morning! I joined a group of Plein Air painters at Maidens cove, near Camps Bay. Now firstly, I have lived in Cape Town since I was 17 and I have never been to Maidens Cove, and secondly, I have never seen so many paintings just waiting to be painted in one place!!! .... and I didn't have the confidence to take my oils! - I left them at home!!!! Well we women make a plan! I first sat under my enormous garden umbrella on a rock and sketched. Just let the juices flow! It was sheer heaven! Yes, the woman is a rock! there are five of them, although I could only see four. Then I got out my watercolour paper and drew another view of her - keeping a careful eye on compisition etc. One gets so tied up in detail that I really battled to get her shape right! But eventually I had enough down on the paper to bring out the watercolours. I am rather chuffed with the result even if it is rather pale and misty- that...

A recent holiday stay in Wilderness provided an opportunity to take some new photographs of this magnificent part of South Africa. I hope to be posting several of them over the next few weeks. Although we frequently visit this area, it's one of our favourite places, changing weather, light, tides and floods (more of that later) provide new photographic opportunities on every visit. This picture was taken on the beach in the early evening of the day we arrrived. It was a cloudy, misty day and I loved the moody feel of the beach

Oil on Canvas 76cm x 38cm

I wish I had the time to study and paint the sea as a full time project! Maybe one day!

Don't think that your painting will always turn out as you carefully planned them - sometimes things go awry! This was supposed to be a romantic sunset. Obviously a lot of angst was ready to erupt!

SOLD Slangkop lighthouse is the tallest iron tower on the South African Coast and sits at the one end of Kommetjie. It measures 100 feet from base to the balcony and has been operational since 1919. Every lighthouse has a different frequency of flashes and this one emits four flashes every 30 seconds as it turns and can be seen for 33 sea miles. Here is an oil painting of the lighthouse from a photograph Bryan took. I would like to do a watercolour of it sometime soon.

Thanks Liz, for getting me back to my water colours!!! It was great fun and really freed me up to at long last finish my lighthouse which I will be posting soon. I have not touched my water colours for over 10 years so I needed quite a bit of encouragement - not a bad first try I think, after such a long time!

My first ever entry into a photographic competition (Sunday Argus) and I am a runner up! My word what a surprise! Here is the picture I entered. The big problem is that the competition organisers will only take photo's that are 1 MB or more and I have a baby camera that does not take photos that size. I don't know if they will accept any more entries from me. I will be e mailing them to ask. When the competition started the weekly prize was a weekend away, which I was after, but they seem to have stopped that and now give away a dinner for two at the Blowfish Restaurant. Perhaps they should give a camera as a prize instead of the dinner for two! Funnily enough only last week I finished a painting of the very same photograph! Here is a photograph of the painting.

I had a huge amount of fun with this painting. I mixed a thick paste of cold glue (wood glue), Polyfilla and a tiny bit of water. I then plastered this across the top of my board sweeping down where I would be painting clouds. I created a relief for the land mass and slightly raised the waves coming onto the beach. I then went wild with colour and this was the result.

I have just had two pictures framed. Compare these with the unframed versions. Art Class and My smallest painting yet I am delighted with the results.

This was painted from a photo Bryan took on a walk we did along a beautiful path that wound its way towards Sandbaai.

The widespread adoption of digital cameras and photo-editing software provides the opportunity to correct colour casts and exposure problems as well as make image enhancements. It also allows the photographer to radically alter images. The end product may bear little resemblance to the original image and may even become completely abstract. Colours can be dramatically changed and images distorted in a multitude of ways. Is it art? I believe it very definitely is. It is conceptually little different from the manipulation of traditional photographs in the darkroom during processing and printing. The photographer must still decide on the changes he will make, select an image to work with and accept or reject the result. The final image is very much an expression of his artistic talent.

Something bright and different. Once again we really battled to get the colours accurate in the photograph.

Wow. I have started a weekly art class with Phillip Glazer at the Frank Joubert Art School. As you may have gathered I have been battling with colour! For a few weeks now I have been trying to paint sea and landscapes from some of our many photographs, but with disastrous results. What a difference it makes to have a teacher say “leave it alone now, that’s perfect”, before you over do things. How helpful it is have someone there to give advice on mixing shades and colours and to hold your painting up at a distance so that you see it as it should be seen. One always forgets to do this. Not having had any formal art training it was a very exciting experience and a huge learning curve. I hope you like the results!

A late summer visit to the spectacular Noordhoek Beach on Cape Town’s Atlantic coast, for a walk with the dog, produced an unexpected bonus. We saw a photographer with a long telephoto lens staring out to sea for ages and wondered what he was trying to photograph. After much searching we spotted a large school of dolphins frolicking in the bay. Out came the Cannon camera. Thank goodness for its built in 12 times optical zoom, a very effective image stabiliser and a convenient large rock to lean against. Even with these aids capturing the fast moving Dolphins was challenging! At full zoom your field of view is tiny and the Dolphins unpredictable.

Here are two photographs taken relatively close to home. We had spent the day in the town of Hermanus, about one and half hours drive from Cape Town and were returning via the coastal route around False Bay. The sun was setting in an “angry” looking sky providing a wonderful and unusual view of the southern part of the Cape Peninsula in silhouette between the dark waters of the bay and the sunset painted sky.