See nature with understanding

Coffee back-ground (Nescafé instant) and colour wash on Bockingford 300gsm

I was actually trying for an abstract here, but it seems nature surfaces every time I put brush to paper...

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View from my bedroom window

Wishful thinking on my part! Two of my sketches framed by a window view.

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Morning cup of coffee

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce. 

 ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “Over the Teacups,” 1891

Ink sketch on Visual 200gsm watercolour paper, using a Pilot Calligraphy Lettering pen (Black) and a Pilot black Fineliner for finer work. 

Sketching has always been one of my great passions, but of late I’ve been neglecting it in favour of doing mostly watercolours. I’ve decided to go back to basics and sketch a lot more.

Sketching forces you to look in more detail, and ask yourself what you actually see. You’ll end up seeing a lot more than you would otherwise. There’s something about holding a pen or pencil in your hand that gets your creative juices flowing in a much different way than holding a brush. When you get used to sketching, the movements of your hand become much more fluid and it becomes really easy and natural. The more you practice, the better you will become at sketching.

Here I’ve sketched one of my pet hates – tea or coffee in THICK hospital-like cups! (Sketched at the Krugersdorp Private Hospital, Krugersdorp, Gauteng, South Africa).

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Some rain, some heat...

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. 

 ~Kojiro Tomita 

 W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm

Some rain, some heat and some cold - that's how our summer has been going. Mornings start off cool, getting hot and humid in the afternoon, ending with thunderstorms which is more noise than rain. But I'm grateful that we're getting our bit, after a cold, dry winter we badly need it.

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Kiep, my Bantam

I’m a free range chicken. 

I do what I want. 

I’m a free range chicken. 

I go where I want. 

I peck a little here. 

I peck a little there. 

I’m a free range chicken. 

That’s what I’m doing here! 

- Unknown 

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

Kiep, my little pet hen, comes from Bantam stock, though clearly mixed with a variety of other chicken breeds, and she actually looks like a miniature Leghorn.

Bantam chickens have been domesticated for centuries. In fact, they are one of the oldest known domestic animals. Marco Polo wrote about banties in his journal. While all bantams are chickens, not all chickens are banties. 

All bantams are smaller than regular chickens and they share some unique personality traits. I personally think they have more personality than chickens do, are more able to care for themselves, and find more of their own food. They seem to keep the grasshopper population down better than other types of poultry! I haven’t seen a bug in my garden for ages since introducing chickens to my garden again.

Healthy bantams are curious. They will check out anything that seems unusual and loudly announce the arrival of visitors. I do not keep them locked in the pen, they roam as much as possible (a chicken’s raison de etre!) and have access to fresh, green grass, insects, and whatever else they find in addition to the feed I give them. And I'm rewarded with breakfast every morning!

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Keeping a Journal

Ink sketch and watercolour

Journaling is the process of regularly writing your thoughts, your dreams, milestones, events and feelings down on paper and, these days, virtually on blogs. There are many different kinds of journals you can choose to keep but it is a powerful process that provides the opportunity to explore things in a measured way. It can also be fun to look back and discover how far you have come!

"A common symptom of modern life is that there's no time for thought, or for letting the impressions of the day sink in," says Thomas Moore. Setting aside a block of time, however brief, to freely express thoughts and feelings is psychically healthy.

Journals also affirm the value of our lives, preserve our memories and dreams, and help to pin-point emotional patterns. Writing about problems is a great way to work them out, and recording negative emotions is often akin to dropping them altogether.

Keeping a nature journal, for example, is a wonderful way to become spiritually centred. We are rewarded for the attention to detail and patience this practice requires with deepened understanding of what it means to be human and alive and a part of Creation. What you decide to put in your journal is a personal choice. Nature journals can be anything from field notes, which limit themselves to objective descriptions of what the writer has observed, to fully developed poems, stories, or essays in which the landscape is a major character.

You may want to draw or paint in your journal as well as write in it or to fill its pages with photographs or pressed flowers. Experience the natural world through fresh eyes! Keeping a nature journal is your most powerful ally in crafting the kind of life you want.

 One of my Nature Journals - here I used a Feint

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Inner mystery

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - inspired by Maya Angelou's poem

Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can't touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them

They say they still can't see.

I say,

It's in the arch of my back,

The sun of my smile,

The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I'm a woman.

Phenomenally.,

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

Extract from 'Phenomenal Woman" Maya Angelou 

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Go ahead! Throw the first stone!

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

Sin is a very liberating thing. It’s a shame we have forgotten it. Just think what might not have happened in the world if we had had a little more respect for personal sins, a little more knowledge of our own, a little less condemnation of everyone else’s. We may have been spared the shame of the stocks in Boston, the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, the penal colonies in Georgia, the back-alley births of so many children of single mothers, the front-page pictures of professional people found drunk in public and, in our own day, the Web pages of sleazy private information released to justify the impeachment of a president.

We love making sinners “stand in front of us.” In public. How else can their sins take attention away from our own?

It isn’t, of course, that there’s no place for accountability. It’s just that there’s no place for condemnation once we face our own sins. The problem is simply that there’s no place for stoning if we are the ones supposed to be pure enough to do it.

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The nameless, the hopeless...

“To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.” 

- Erica Jong (American writer and feminist, 1942) 

Coffee and watercolour on tea-stained Bockingford 300gsm – 11″ × 8″ 

For the lost, hopeless and nameless, it might be a good idea to start talking about where you’re going instead of about where you are, and where you’ve been. Because, as you talk about where you are, or about where you’ve been, that’s the signal that you offer—and that’s the signal that everything Universally is responding to. That’s why it feels sometimes like you’re stuck on this spot. You’re not stuck because things are always changing. But if it feels like you’re stuck, it’s because they’re changing to the same thing over and over again.

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Unusual winter in South Africa

W&N watercolours on Arches 300gsm 

A couple of years ago, in August 2006, South Africa was struck by an unusual phenomena, snow! It is something we rarely experience and it therefore always creates great excitement as well as hard-ship. Especially in the farming community, as livestock is always at risk because of the vast sizes of our farms and the large numbers of livestock we farm with – no barns really big enough to house all of them. No protection against the freezing temperatures and also a great problem with feed supplies. Luckily, people like us on smallholdings (8.5ha, which is 10 morgen or 21 acres), have fewer animals, making winter much more manageable, but still not worry-free.

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