Autumn - wonderful time of the year!

A small W&N watercolour in Moleskine 200gsm watercolour sketch-book

Autumn (fall) in South Africa (mid-February to April) offers the best weather of the year. Very little rain falls over the whole country, and it is warm but not too hot, getting colder as the season progresses. In Gauteng, autumn is fantastic, with hot sunny days, blue skies and warm, balmy nights.

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A Windpomp and a gate

 

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm

A familiar sight in South Africa – a windmill drawing the life blood from the earth.

Water availability has shaped life and society in many ways, with aridity shaping the landscape and soils and determining where we live, grow our crops, raise animals and build our cities. Without these wind pumps, farming, and life in general, would not be possible in the more arid parts of our country.

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This garden that I know

 "There is a garden that is not like the other gardens round about. In many of these gardens the flowers are only prisoners, forced to weave carpets on the changeless turf, and when the eye is sated and the impression palls, they become to their owners, who have no part in them, merely purchased episodes. 

This garden that I know has a bit of green, a space of flowers, and a stretch of wildness, as Bacon says a garden should always have. At its birth, the twelve months each gave to it a gift, that it might always yield an offering to the year, and presently it grew so lovable that there came to it a soul."

From 'The Story of a Garden' by Mabel Osgood Wright (1859-1934)

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I am the Earth

W&N watercolour on smooth cardboard - no preliminary sketching 

A rocky outcrop on the way to Magaliesburg (Gauteng, South Africa) - I have walked to the top of this little hillock just to have a look at all the rocks, makes one wonder what forces of Mother Nature were at work to have scattered them here....

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The purest joy that Earth can give

Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true
lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness
in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that
earth can give her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent,
uplifting, unfailing.
- Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, 1894

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8"

Painting flowers has become quite a passion of mine, after spending years avoiding them. My thinking behind that: there are so many wonderful flower artists out there, excellent at capturing their beauty, how much more could I add? After trying a couple, I fell in love with it and realised that there are thousands of ways to portray the beauty of flowers, and that artists will NEVER be able to exhaust the many ways of showing off one of nature's wonders!