Water in a dry place.

A recurring theme in my work is that of water - a lack of it, too much of it,  a bowl of it or a cloud full of it. I have explored this theme from many aspects. I save water in my home, work not pollute our oceans and stand up for clean water for everyone. Water is precious and we need it far more than many of the other things that we think we need.

A theme that I keep coming back to in my paintings and photos is that of a pool of water in an otherwise dry landscape. The initial inspiration was a farmers dam at sunrise while on a road trip in 1992. It burned in to my imagination so deeply I have neither forgotten it or shaken the impulse to explore it.

In Botswana, we drove through a landscape in the driest stretch of it's dry season. Rain hadn't been seen in months and water holes were cracked, parched reminders of what had been. In Savute we found that the marsh had (in the mysterious way that it does) started to fill a few weeks prior, despite i tbeing in the driest months of the year. A possible tectonic shift had sent water flowing back in to the landscape from a distant source.  Small streams and rivulets ran from the river which flowed to the marsh and seeped  in to the cracked-dry earth. Once the ground was water-logged, pools formed.

The blue of the sky mirrored in the water's surface and contrasted with the dry-yellow of the grasses all around. Tell-tale green shoots were coming up all around, even well away from the pooling of water, sensing the return of moisture. New life, hope, food, relief and a study in contrasts.

Water in a dry place.

Beauty in the details

I always use travel to recharge creative juices very often depleted by getting through the daily grind. It helps that as a family we err towards travel to the wild and beautiful places that inspire me. The past 6 weeks have delivered on every front and in quite different ways.

What strikes me the most is the contrast between a wintery Western Cape in South Africa, followed by the dry landscape of Botswana.  

Winter sun in South Africa left colours saturated and recent rain had brought a lushness and deep greens to landscapes that are dusty and dry in the summer months. Aloes in full bloom lined the roads of the garden route and brilliant yellow Lucerne fields cut swaths through green farmland. Rainwater tanks, earthen dams, windmills and simple farmhouses - all long standing areas of exploration in my work, lined the roads as we drove up and down the coast.

 Favorite themes revisited.

                  

Then we switched gears, flew and drove north into a landscape where annual evaporation exceeds annual rainfall and the rain that does fall, comes in the summer months. It is a bone dry landscape in the winter with deeply rutted tracks bearing witness to summer mud now rock hard and devoid of water. 

The beauty here? Some of it lay simply in the stark, vastness of the landscape but most of it lay in the details and contrasts. Beauty lies in the lines of a road cutting through an empty landscape, the brilliant yellow of grasses against a deep blue sky, a brilliant orange seed pod, the paper-thin layers of a fallen Baobab tree, the tenacity of a thorn tree growing in a place with little to no rainfall, it's branches designed to bring maximum shade to animals seeking shelter from the relentless sun.

               

Beauty in the bush lies in the small patches of black just above an impala's hoof, the delicate polka dots on a Chobe bushbuck's belly, the crazy stripes on a zebra that continue up the his/ her mane, a warthog's Mohawk, the gingery tear drop above a lion's eye and the light dots on their massive paws, a giraffe's long neck and eyelashes, the iridescent hues of the lilac breasted roller, the brilliant sheen and elegant curved horns of the sable antelope. All this attention to detail reminds me of couture on a catwalk, except that this is everyday dress for the animal kingdom. 

Rain, dry, lush, barren, empty, full, blue against gold, red against grey, immense trees reduced to paper thin reminders of centuries of growth. So many contrasts, so much beauty.

             

           

           

           

Full circle Full hearts

The past few days have been the completion of a loop of sorts, taking us to the far side of the ancient pans of our first days and then traversing them on a track marked by GPS points rather than road paint or signs. Once again, it was only us and a vast and empty landscape in every direction. Ancient silt, now a chalky powder covered our clothes and bodies and added a new layer of dust to every surface, bag, camera and book.

We found our way to what was once an island in the middle of a long-gone lake. Even though the water dried up 1000s of years ago, the ancient shore line was rimmed with the round rocks and pebbles, as if at any moment a gentle wave might roll in and lap the shore. Like many a high place in a flat landscape, this island holds mystical importance to local people both ancient and current. Prayers for rain are still made here and 100s of cairns speak of initiation rituals long past. Baobab trees, with bark that seems to fall somewhere between skin and polished granite cover the island. Their roots snake in and out of the ground, their branches reaching out like the arms of a benevolent giant.

After hours of island magic, came the hard work of completing our journey, closing the circle and getting ourselves many hundreds of kilometers across 2 countries and to an airport in time for a series of international flights.

We took in our last African sunsets, found the southern cross in the night sky one last time and burned a last Mopane fire with full but heavy hearts. We watched a final bushveld sunrise this morning as we crossed the fabled Limpopo River. In crossing the Limpopo, we left Botswana and returned to South Africa, completing the circle our travels had created.

Shortly, we will unpack ourselves from and say goodbye to the Landrover which has been our transport and home for 3 weeks. I now know why these vehicles inspire such passion in their owners, it has seen us churning through thick sand, water logged marshes and impossible looking roads. Now we fly down a 4 lane highway with only the dust covering us to tell of the adventure we left behind.

Full circle, full hearts. We will be back for more.

No lights

The latest leg of our adventure has taken us through vast landscapes with few signs of human impact and few people, even travelers such as ourselves are very few. We have driven for hours without passing another human being and had close encounters with lion - with only us and them and all of us a similar shade of dusty-grey, from head to toe.

Campsites are few, spread apart, without water and very hard to get to. There is no one to call for help if needed, but there is also no one to disturb the sounds of the African night as it descends. We are deep in the Central Kalahari, a vast and relatively inhospitable place where annual evaporation exceeds annual rainfall. We are very far from powerlines, cell towers or paved roads. I found myself looking at the sky last night and picturing night-time satellite images of Earth, where continents and cities are mapped out by lines and clusters of light on an otherwise dark planet.

I realized the the various places I have called home, have always been identified up by a cacophony of lights.  This time I would find my location by seeking out a vast area of darkness in the middle of Africa. No lights, just a deep dark night sky above us and the African night enveloping us.

 If you look on a map, there we are, right in the middle, looking up at the Milky Way.

Chobe-Savute-Maun

We are in Maun, regrouping after an amazing, exhausting, exhilarating run down the Chobe River and through Savute. We have spent our days watching extraordinary animals living out their days in the unspoilt wilds, where they always have lived. What amazes me is the improbability of their bodies (giraffe, hippos, elephants), the delicate beauty of their markings (zebra, Chobe bushbuck and even the ubiquitous impala) and the ever watchfulness of those who are on the dinner menu of larger creatures.

We drove down impossible seeming roads, got incredibly filthy with dust forming drifts inside our vehicle as we drove. We pulled ourselves out of bed before dawn each morning to get on the road to see game and search for elusive cats. (We were rewarded both by a pride of 7  young lion playing in the first rays of sunlight, as well a very close encounter a lioness and her 3 cubs.) By the end, we were dust colored from head to toe and needed a breather as much as a shower.

The Island Safari Lodge in Maun is just the kind of place for breathers. Our laundry is now done, our bodies are clean, our groceries restocked and our water and diesel tanks filled back up again.

We had a slow day today, with time for dragonfly catching and a breakfast involving all sorts of things not served on our safari (blame the tour operator - oh yes, that would be me!). The 8 year old's tooth that fell out somewhere in Savute, but it wasn't left out for the tooth mouse/fairy for fear it would get lost in the endless fine sand that was our home. He is currently awaiting a visit from whomever does the job in Botswana. (We have decided it might be a tooth spring hare due to their ridiculous cuteness.) 

We are readying ourselves for our most remote and extreme camping of this adventure, we left it for last in the hopes that our greater experience would keep us safe and happy in a place not highly recommended for solo travel. We will be very remote, with no water for 4 days, few people and minimal roads, we leave at dawn tomorrow. I can't wait to get out of my comfy(ish) bed and back in to the Landrover, it is starting to feel like home.

In the company of elephants.

When game viewing, one is generally safe from animals when inside a vehicle. Strangely enough a lion will not see a human as a source off food when sitting inside an open-roofed Landrover, but stick a limb out of it our step out to take a photo, he/she is likely to eat you for breakfast. The only creature who poses a danger to those inside our vehicles is an elephant - a true giant of a creature who if disgruntled can tip or peel open a Landrover as if it were a can of tuna.

Being a mother brings out protective instincts like none other and as a result the elephants to be treated with the most caution are the mothers. 

On our first day of driving on the bush, we found ourselves having to pass through numerous breeding herds of elephant, with mammas and babies all around and the need to navigate them with great caution. While waiting for one particular herd to cross the road another vehicle approached too fast from the other side, disrupting the otherwise docile (but watchful) giants. A ripple of irritation ran through the herd and a large cow raised her heads and walked 40 feet straight towards us, with a purpose to her gait. She walked right up to our Landrover and stopping alongside my passenger window, she turned to face us, staring us down for a terrifying five minutes (or maybe it was two, but it felt like ten!). She was mere feet from myself and our 8 year old son and one flick of her tusks would have tipped us. The pounding of my heart was deafening. Having put us in our place, she turned to the shrub alongside her to eat some some choice leaves. She had put us in our place in no uncertain term.

Over the next week we encountered many more elephants, encountering many more breeding herds along the banks of the Chobe River. In contrast, we also encountered the lone bulls that are characteristic to Salute National Park. These males are docile (no babies to protect) and spend their days alone, unusual for such sociable creatures and leading them to seemingly seek out the company of humans from time to time.

On our last morning in Savute, we stopped to eat breakfast on a dry pan with a clear view all around us. it was a chance to stretch our legs and bask in the morning sun, before a long drive down to Maun. We noticed a tree moving and shaking on the far edges of the pan and after a few minutes an elephant made his way out of the bushes, seeming to move towards us. He got unnervingly close and as Mom of our particular herd, I decided we needed a little more space between. We moved our apple eating (an elephant favorite) family a little further away. Once again he moved towards us. This time, possibly sensing our need for distance he stopped a little further off and then simply kept us company, joining us for breakfast.

When it was time to go, there was an almost wistful goodbye as he raised his head and watched us leave. We called and waved from our windows and he raised his trunk in goodbye.

(The iPhone photo makes him look much further away than he was, but I like the feeling of the vastly empty place where we met up with him.)

Contrasts

The subject of my work is very often one of contrasts - water in a dry place, torrential rain and a bowl waiting to be filled, a small house in a vast landscape. It is the dynamic relationship between these opposites that I love - both the place where they meet and also the place where the scales which measure them find balance. 

The dry-season landscape of Botswana is one of extreme contrasts with Eden-like idylls of lush green and intermingling animals along a rivers edge which quickly drops off to dry sandy earth with hardy shrubs and then a little further away, the landscape becomes one of barren, parched earth where no water has been seen for months and no animals are found.

Water holes are now cracked-earth reminders of what was and what will be once again when the rain returns. For now they are silent and waiting.

Grass that was tall and green is now golden and stretches like a sea to the horizon. Where vast herds flock in the rains, one now sees only the odd giraffe or elephant. This seen whilst driving a road usually impassably muddy in the wet months, now caked and bumpy with rock hard potholes.

Amidst the vast dryness of Savute we found a small bit of wonder - a channel that seems to open and close due to tectonic shifts and who knows what else - which meant that a marshland which had been dry for months had started to fill again. This return of water magically appearing at at the height of the dry season.

 Driving across the surface of the still mostly dry marsh bed, we found rivulets and streams flowing in and dispersing - seeping in to the parched earth, filing it with water until the soil could hold no more and pools formed. Well away from the pools were green shoots coming up beneath the dry grasses, as if the grasses could sense the water coming or maybe they were tapping into minuscule seepage below the still dry surface. 

Minutes away from this returning life were  bone dry pans that would have to wait for the rains to see a return of life. 

Fine white dust with an almost impossible dryness.

(Small boy making the most of a sign posted on the tree designating this as a "stretching point".)

The beauty of a book.

We are traveling through an  extraordinarily beautiful, remote and harsh landscape where our days are filled with the hard work of bush camping, but the work is more than matched by the rewards of being here. 

There are those who wouldn't bring young children on this kind of adventure due to the lack of physical comfort and the fact that elephant, lion and hyaena regularly roam through the campgrounds at night. We work hard all day to keep the kids safe, fed, happy and willing to be roused before sunrise for game drives. As night falls the need to keep them inside the safety of our camp rises sharply.

 I have always loved the way a good book smooths the edges of a tough day. What is even more beautiful is when one sees the same love of reading in ones children, alongside a fire on which dinner is cooking, at the end of a dusty day.

Shortly after the photo was taken, the boys were tucked up in rooftop tents and younger brother was asleep within minutes.

Breakfast

Our camp for the past 2 nights has been on the banks of the Chobe River. We are deep in the bush and apart from the ten or so of us camping, there is no one else here at night. Just us and what at times looks like an Eden of impala, zebra, hippo, fish eagle, elephant, all mingling on the shores and flats, which in the rainy season are submerged by the river. Hyaena and hippo keep us awake while elephant  move silently past our tents at night and gentle impala and zebra wander through our campsite at dawn. This morning's game drive took us out of our camp as the sun rose, the past few days we have had amazing game viewing but as yet had seen no lion. Shortly after leaving camp we passed through herds of impala and zebra standing in the first, early golden rays of then sun. We rounded a corner and came across a group of 6 young lioness, lying on an open piece of veld, right next to the road. We were the first and only to spot them and had them to ourselves as the basked in the sun. True royalty of the bush, they showed little interest in our presence, clearly rulers of their surroundings. Eventually they got up and headed off in to the deeper bush, climbing tree trunks and playing with each other, chasing, tumbling, pouncing with tails high and dust billowing as their play kicked it up. Eventually they were gone, blending back in to the bush, with no hint that they had just been there.  The encounter was brief and extraordinary, we felt blessed to have been there for that brief moment of wonder.

Breakfast followed a little further down the road, with apricot jam on bread baked in yesterday's fire, fruit, tea, coffee and hot chocolate on the roof of the Landrover. Around us were giraffe, impala and of course baboon (hoping to sneak an apple) and the Chobe glistened alongside us. A pair of local fishermen poled past us on their mokoro's, greeting us with a wave. We waved back and shouted hello in Tswana - "dumela!". Breakfast in Africa.

Where the Earth meets the sky.

After a lot of planning, dreaming, hard work and un-inspiring highways and border posts, we have finally arrived exactly where we wanted to be. We are in a place of utterly vast, empty beauty where ones eye travels all the way to where the land and sky meet.  We are in the Nata Bird Sanctuary in central Botswana. There is no one else here, just us and a sea of yellow grass, with an ancient salt pan lying beyond it, extending until it touches the sky. I explained the word "horizon" to our two boys, pointing to the far distant shimmering line where salt pan and blue sky meet each other. I couldn't have found  a more perfect example.

After a full moon night we woke to the same view but this time it was lit up by the gold of an African sunrise, the moon still hanging heavily above us. We loaded up our Landrover and hit the road again, this time heading due North to Kasane and Chobe National Park, one of Africa's remaining Edens.

Cape Town to Maun

I am in wintery Cape Town but tomorrow we pick up a Landrover and head in to the wilds and wonder of Botswana. It will be just the 4 of us, some maps, a GPS and a desire to be far from all that usually consumes our days. We have things we hope to see (Lions, barking Geckos, elephants are all high on the list). I am looking forward to the vast nighttime skies of the African bush and taking time to take in details of my days. Even though being off the grid is one of the things I look forward to the most, I might turn up in my blog from time to time too as a way to record and remember things that strike a chord. Yesterday I spent a day at the edge of a stormy, rainbow-skied winter ocean with rain showers and surfers taking off in massive swell. Tomorrow I travel in to the bush with it's bone dry days and freezing nights. From rain seeping all around to dust that permeates everything, I can't wait.

Kalk Bay

A magnificent winter's day in one of my favorite places on earth truly delivered. Company, food, rainbows, a harbor that seems to be almost lost in time and light and colours so intense one couldn't help but take notice.

I shall have to return, but for now it is on to the next adventure.

Beautiful Land.

There is nothing like a road trip through a landscape one has known since birth when one has lived far away for two decades. Everything is deeply familiar, yet at the same time fresh and new. South Africa's fields and farms are the first source of my inspiration and what inspires me in other landscapes has roots very often right here. Wintery light right now means intense colour, green grasses and flowering succulents not seen in the dry months of summer. I sit in the passenger seat, eyes (and iPhone) glued to the passing landscape. Familiar imagery and new inspiration. Such a beautiful land. I look forward to getting back in to my studio to see where this takes me.

Painting Days

Having painted lots of blues and greys all winter, my palette seems unable to do anything right now but reflect the brilliance outside my studio. Pinks, yellows, greens and blues all have all moved to front and center. No longer are these brilliant tones a splash of colour to accent a more muted piece, they are currently the stars of the show.

The series I am currently working on is simply called "Colour Series". It is a body of work I began, having realized that all I want to explore right now is colour in all it's nuances, tones and relationships. The best thing to do in these situations is to dive right in and revel in the options, so I am.

Yellow has alway been a hard colour for me to work with, I have never found yellows to be a colour that took up large space on my canvases. Finally I am finding  a place for it - mostly lemony, green hued yellows, but yellows nonetheless in all their wonder. Bearing in mind the previous post, it doesn't take much to see the beginnings of my new enthusiasm for yellow.

Pink is a colour that has suffered great overuse and abuse, but is a true color of Spring and appears in nature with such magnificence that I cannot leave it out. Pink walks a line between the tepid pinks of pastels and the deep magenta-hues of the Peonies that have just bloomed in my garden. I love to give pink it's due and let it stand for all things deeply feminine and strong.

Green, like yellow is a color I have danced around a bit and never really explored. Now that it is spring, how can I not draw inspiration from the insanely grassy-green grass and brilliant yellow-green tips on the trees outside my window? As a result, there is lots of green being mixed on my palette.

There is of course always blue on my palette, it is the color that speaks to me most truly. I am adding bits of brilliance and hints of grey to my blues, so that they can best off-set the brilliance elsewhere.

As the days heat up and we head towards summer with the hills around us turning dusty and yellow, will my colors reflect not only summer's brilliance but also the dried-earth ochre and yellowing grass of my days? I look forward to finding out...

Goldsworthy, Rothko and a Farmer on a winter's drive.

A recent drive through wine country had me stopping me in my tracks. I drove past fields in which I thought Andy Goldsworthy had been set loose. Piles of black wood were perfectly heaped in fields of brilliant yellow. Fields of 3D Rothkos. It was stark, yet lush and so insanely stunning. I was observing the work of a farmer and mother nature, not some  handsomely paid commission.

Dead and dormant vines surrounded by fields of  yellow mustard grass flowers. The contrasts of black versus brilliant yellow, carefully tended vines versus wild growth, life versus death all demanded stopping and taking in all I could learn from it. I took photos, did some sketching and a body of work is mulling. 

Thankyou.