COCKATOOTWO

Detail.

SOLD!

To my friends Katherine and Kyle, who will be entering the exciting world of home renovation soon. Right across the street.

COCKATOO

in progress. Detail.

NOMAD GNOME

Two years ago the gnome arrived from Port Elizabeth. We appreciate all the gardening help we can get in Ysterplaat. Artichokes appear to be in no need of gnomes.

TALKING ABOUT MARKETS

Sway Textiles exhibited clothing at Kamersvol Geskenke at Lourensford in Somerset West recently. In Tent B. All signage was effectively co-ordinated. There will be a second event this year, at the end of November, in Irene. Sway will travel up for the occasion.

ITEMS I BOUGHT

at Milnerton market this morning. A doll, made in China, a pocket size book on the work of Raul Dufy, a Mexican-themed, poppies and all, round tray , a bag of garlic from Philippi, and a plastic hand grenade. Empty, and by the looks of it, a perfume container or a toy. Raul Dufy was a fabulous painter, and also a textile designer of note. Like most art history texts, this little book focuses on his drawing and painting and mentions his textiles only in passing, but in the world of textiles, they are revered as SEMINAL Art Deco designs. My ongoing quest to find a really nice book on Dufy remains ongoing. The garlic from Philippi I plan to plant in the garden, aiming for a really potent harvest for a long time to come. I recently saw in a newspaper article that about 70% of Cape Town's fresh produce comes from Philippi, a large and fertile section of the Cape Flats. I sure hope the farmers can keep it up, as there is a lot of pressure from developers on the one hand and informal settlements on the other, and everything else on the third hand. No easy task. The enamel bread bin is another Milnerton Market find. Cape Town has plenty markets, but none other like Milnerton Market, which, it appears, is in fact situated in Paarden Island. This is where trendy furtively meets zef, early on Sunday mornings. No, seriously now: several extremely fashionable shops in the haute parts of town regard Milnerton Market as their best-kept secret despite its being featured in a lavishly illustrated article in the current Kulula in-flight magazine. Secrets are amazing things.

GAUTENG ZEF

My friends Buks and Daleen came to visit Ysterplaat, around the same time that Die Antwoord's video 'Zefside' received some kind of prize or other, and was projected onto the outside walls of the Guggenheim in New York. The Guggenheim in New York. You may remember that 'Zefside' was shot right here in Ysterplaat, shooting Die Antwoord to fame. So we did our own authentic zef shoot.

IN FRANSCHHOEK

'Relief' by Sarel Petrus, and a view of IS Art Gallery at Le Quartier Francais, showing Sarel's 'Falling feathers' and 'Relief', some gallery visitors and some frolicking bronze hares by Guy du Toit. 'Relief' combines a bronze replica of the head of an antelope roadkill with a wooden reproduction of its body as it lay smashed by the roadside. The wood surrounding the antelope (perhaps a grysbok, an oribi or a springbok) is perforated like a postage stamp. 'Falling feathers' are bronze casts of vulture feathers. Sarel works with Guy (who kept his hat on while chatting to the gallery curator) in his studio on a smallholding east of Pretoria.

LILY POND

This is part of a proof print for the pond textile design, which has now been put onto screen at about 70% of the original size. It works as a 'toile' design, but I still would like to develop it as a placement too. Perhaps because I am ever so slightly disappointed by the reduction in size (inevitable, to fit onto the printer's screen). Oh well.

WORKING DRAWINGS

Sketches for a textile design inspired by Maria Sibylla Merian's botanical illustrations, mostly engravings, published in the eighteenth century. However much one admires Merian's engravings one has to, however, consider that some people may think of grubs, snails, caterpilars, flies, gila monsters and such like as unbeautiful. But some people may not.

GARDENING IN SANDY SOIL

Soil in Ysterplaat is sandy and it sukkels with absorbing water, almost as if it were oily. So one is happy when one reads (online, on one of those advice-giving sites about food gardening that endeavour to say nothing but positive things) that one of the great advantages of gardening in sandy soil is that it is liked by subterranean vegetables. My radishes appear to be circumstantial evidence.

A BOOK FROM ITALY

My friend Paolo de Anna sent me this beautiful book of which he is the author. It tells the story of bronze restoration work Bruno Bearzi (a family member of Paolo) undertook in Florence after the second world war. The book is in Italian but I have a dictionary and I plan to read it cover to cover whatever it takes. The Bearzi, Vignali and Gamberini families are bronze workers traceable to Renaissance times. They have been instrumental in spreading bronze working skills all over the world; Sarel Petrus learnt his craft in the Vignali Foundry in Pretoria North, South Africa.

PAARL AIR SHOW

Paper planes made of bronze, titled All right. And a selection of bronze feathers and other objects at Off the Wall Contemporary in Main Road, Paarl. One has to see them to believe them.

YSTERPLAAT AIR SHOW TWO

Jay was given some training while Ida was a helicopter pilot about to become a parachutist.

STILL LIFE WITH ARMED VEHICLE

YSTERPLAAT AIR SHOW

Ida and Jay went to the military air show at Ysterplaat Air Force Base, just down the road. Fortunately Ida has a hat with a flying bull terrier, and an aeroplane badge, and Jay has an Ysterplaat T shirt. Its the biggest air show in Africa.

BEAUTIFUL WORK

Want to see some really beautiful things? Go to www.sarelpetrus.blogspot.com to see a range of new works Sarel is exhibiting at the Aardklop Festival. He will also have works on show at Off the Wall Contemporary in Paarl next weekend. I am going to go there to take pictures and blog about them.

TWO LISTS

According to a little booklet on frogs, frogs are:

• everywhere


• entirely harmless


• not destroyers of crops or property


• not transmitters of human disease


• amphibians


• fascinating: they metamorphose from tadpole to frog, becoming a totally different creature in a matter of days. (Wouldn't it be marvellous if humans had the ability to become different creatures, even if it took a little longer?)

and yet, they are often loathed and feared. Me, I like frogs.

I was working on a paisley design in which I used two frogs to tie things together, so to speak; then I decided to start a new design with a frog as central image, and working towards the top, adding most, some or all of the following:

• lillies
• waterblommetjies
• agapanthus
• a mouse
• a bird
• clouds
• perhaps an aeroplane, or a
• hadida if space allows, which it ought to. (Mmm. Notice some repetition here?)

The images above are of the two designs. Neither has been completed, but I sure hope they both soon will be. On the drawing board they are black on white, but they will eventually be printed in different colours, no doubt.

FLORAL

This combination of floral pants and floral shoes was spotted in Somerset-West recently. Just look at those peonies! And roses!

IDENTIFY

I met a man selling herbs and other remedies on a Salt River street yesterday. Having recently read a book about commercial plant production for medicinal use in South Africa, I was interested in his business, so I stopped for a chat. Eric, as he introduced himself, explained the uses of his wares to me, and assured me that the two items I was most interested in would grow again if I planted them and watered them twice a day, once before sunrise and once after sunset. I bought them, and tried to identify them from Eric's descriptions and Medicinal Plants of South Africa (van Wyk et al). I concluded that the one on the left is a crinum bulb, and the one on the right a rhoicissus tuber. I may be right, I may be wrong; only time will tell, perhaps. Rhoicissus is also known as Bobbejaantou, so I am told, so I planted it right under a tree where monkeys will be welcome to tie knots, if they want to. If Paisley agrees.

KRUIDJIE ROER MY NIE

Happiness is having a melianthus go wild in one's garden. Sadie joined our menagerie from the Karoo (through the kind workings of Colette of KAPS, Karoo Animal Protection Society, who will be astounded if she ever gets to see little Sadie rushing into the waves when she goes walking on the beach).

BERNHARD AND CLIVIA

Amazing, isn't it, when one 'discovers' an author one never heard of when he was around and writing, and one was reading, at the time, all kinds of things but not his works. And he was famous, even then. Better late than never, so here's a page from my drawing pad dedicated to Thomas Bernhard. And the clivias have started blooming again, few things are more amazing than clivias.

Have you ever wondered

how big the internet is? I have. This morning I came upon an answer of sorts (there may be plenty more). This is how it happened. I was lurking around the blog of Javier Marias, whom I may have mentioned before (I am a Marias fan). There I came upon an article written by one Owen Roberts, whom I have never met. Here is the link:

http://www.klsyfrd.com/ndpublishing/?tag=bad-nature

Owen Roberts, while doing some footwork for a new edition of an old work by Marias, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, had this to say about the size of the internet:

... you would never really think about how many Elvis sites there are. According to Quantcast.com rankings, there are more than fifty websites in the top million websites on the Internet. This doesn’t sound like many, but the top million sites get a lot of traffic compared to most sites out there. According to some report written in February of 2008, there were approximately 156 million websites, of which 62 million were active. Considering that the total number of websites on the Internet has grown exponentially since 1995, this number could be way way more...

This was only an aside as he was in fact wondering about how many Elvis sites there are, how active they are, and what all this actually means. His conclusion? Marias is not the only Elvis fan out there (I agree). And the internet is larger than one thinks, whatever one thinks.

Selfportrait

Here I am, searching. That was when Stretch was still around.

Sumo

When I lived in Barrydale, I used enammel paint. In Ysterplaat I have yet to do so.

Another memorable Marias sentence or two,

this time from Your face tomorrow 1: Fever and spear

People cannot help but go and tell what they hear, and they tell everything sooner or later, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, the sorrows and the joys and the resentments, the grievances and the flattery and the plans for revenge, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial - falling in love - and the insignificant - falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought.

The Nightmare

These drawings, done with digital pen and tablet, are called Woman having a nightmare I and II, and Woman waking from a nightmare. Together, they form a narrative, a hyper-realistic one, virtually.

Two crappy videos

Dog poo gets picked up everyday (well, nearly every day) by one of us, and Ysterplaat being in Cape Town, not Vancouver, it gets deposited into the garbage bin. Neatly sealed, most of the time.

Searching for better ways of dealing with this issue, I came across this page, http://www.cityfarmer.org/petwaste.html where two responsible people in two separate videos explain how to compost pet waste. I am impressed. Especially with the lady who has been using this system for more than twenty years.

Swansong

Mute swan, painted panel on a door in Ysterplaat

Headlines

Streets in Ysterplaat are seldom boring.

Nine years

Shing and Mini have been Ida's constant companions for nine years now.

Digging

I spent a morning digging a trench bed for vegetables. Should have dug it wider. In Ysterplaat, at a certain depth, one comes to know with a jolt why the area is called Ysterplaat. Once there one needs a pickaxe. Paisley dug the ditch too. Cat dug the marigolds. The guy at the nursery called them stink Afrikaners, recommending them.

Haastig

This design is intended for a book bag. I set myself a challenge: depict the Karoo without a wind pump. I very nearly failed. Hares and rabbits are amazing animals; they are mythological. The Riverine Rabbit - Bunolagus monticularis - is very rare and endangered. It lives in the Karoo and every time I see roadkill, my heart freezes.

Trouble

Also from a newspaper picture. Like I said, newspaper pictures are great fun to copy. But not TOO closely.

Not in Ysterplaat

Copying newspaper pictures in watercolour is great fun. More often than not, they are portraits. Would this man have appreciated a portrait of himself, I wonder?

Cobalt man

People pass one another on streets not knowing what the other is doing, or is about to do, or has just done.

Life Sentence

My favourite author is Javier Marias, a Spaniard. Here is a single sentence from his novel A Heart so White:

Luisa isn't like that, the new generations are just as scornful, but they express it in a more controlled fashion, Luisa is gentler, although with a sense of rectitude that at times makes her wax very serious, sometimes you just know that she's not joking, she thinks I'm with my father now, but my father has had to go out unexpectedly and that's why I'm listening to these revelations from Custardoy, if they're true; they must be, he's never had any talent for invention, in all his stories he's always kept close to the facts or to what actually happened to him, perhaps that's why he has to experience things and live out his doubleness, because then he can talk about them afterwards, that's his way of being able to conceive of the inconceivable; there are people who know only the fantasies that they themselves experience, who are incapable of imagining anything and so have little insight, using one's imagination avoids many misfortunes, the person who anticipates his own death rarely kills himself, the person who anticipates that of others rarely murders, it's better just to think about murdering someone or killing yourself, there are no consequences, it leaves no traces, even the distant gesture made with a grasping arm, it's all a question of distance and time, if it's a little too far away, the knife stabs the air instead of someone's chest, it doesn't plunge into dark or pale flesh but through the empty air and nothing happens, its passage isn't recorded or registered and so remains unknown, you can't be punished for intentions, failed attacks are often not even spoken of, they're even denied by the intended victims, because everything goes on as before, the air is the same, there's no wound to the skin, there's no change in the flesh, no tear, the pillow pressed down on no one's face is inoffensive, and afterwards everything is exactly the same as before because the mere accumulation of events and the blow that strikes no one and the attempt at suffocation that suffocates no one are not enough in themselves to change things or relationships, neither is repetition or insistence or a frustrated attack or a threat, that aggavates the situation but it doesn't change anything, reality can't be summed up like that, they're just the same as the grasping gestures that Miriam made and her words ("You're mine," "You owe me," "I'm gonna get you," I'll see you in hell"), which did nothing to prevent the subsequent kisses and her singing in the room next door as she lay by the side of the lefthanded man, Guillermo by name, to whom she'd said:"Then you get one woman's death on your hands, either her or me."

Four self-portraits

Sometimes I think the term 'self-portrait' may be a contradiction in terms. Or, more likely, a non sequitur.

Post mortem

Sarel Petrus sends postdated bronze elegies to lost life. This 'postage stamp' depicts a frog, long departed. And the bronze tortoises were once made of flesh and blood, like you and I. In bronze, perhaps, they hold time in their posthumous claws.