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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A written word lives forever

I’ve got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books. 

- JOSEPH FIENNES 

Black Pilot Calligraphy Lettering Pen and wash in Moleskine 200gsm Sketch-book 

Sketching with my pen gives me great pleasure - very often a few lines and a mere doodle start taking shape and something appears that can be worked into something more substantial.

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Cumulus humilis (Cu hum)

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.” 

― Walt Stanchfield

W&N watercolour on Aqua 300gsm (Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa)

While sketching this landscape, I was fascinated by the colour of the clouds. So as soon as I finished, I decided to research some clouds and came up with some interesting information.

Cumulus humilis (Cu hum) is the smallest non-ragged cloud and usually shows a light-grey shading underneath.

These are small fair-weather cumuliform clouds of limited convection that do not grow vertically and generally do not produce rain showers. Being at or near the beginning of the convective cloud’s daily life cycle, they lack the moderate vertical extent of cumulus mediocris. Consequently they are commonly classified as low clouds. Cumulus mediocris (Cu med) achieves moderate vertical development, has medium-grey shading underneath, and can produce scattered showers of light intensity.

Striking cloud colorations can be seen at many altitudes in the homosphere, which includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesophere. The first recorded colored cloud was seen by Nathan Ingleton in 1651, he wrote the event in his diary but the records were destroyed in 1666, in the Great Fire of London. The color of a cloud, as seen from Earth, tells much about what is going on inside the cloud.

Cloud droplets tend to scatter light efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth into the gases. As a result, the cloud base can vary from a very light to very-dark-grey depending on the cloud’s thickness and how much light is being reflected or transmitted back to the observer. Thin clouds may look white or appear to have acquired the color of their environment (cloud iridescence).

Colors occur naturally in tropospheric clouds. Bluish-grey is the result of light scattering within the cloud. The bluish color is evidence that such scattering is being produced by rain-size droplets in the cloud. A cumulonimbus cloud that appears to have a greenish/bluish tint is a sign that it contains extremely high amounts of water; hail or rain.

Yellowish or brownish clouds may occur in the late spring through early fall months during forest fire season. The yellow color is due to the presence of pollutants in the smoke. Yellowish clouds, caused by the presence of nitrogen dioxide, are sometimes seen in urban areas with high air pollution levels. This info from Wiki

So, either our veldfire-season has started already or I’m living in a highly polluted area!

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Unobstructed view

“The whole essence of good drawing – and of good thinking, perhaps – is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.” 

— Chuck Jones 

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gms

After the winter veld fires and now that we've had our first summer rains, the landscape is once again turning green and we have an unobstructed view towards the Magaliesberg Mountains in the distance.

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No rain yet...

Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams. 

- Ashley Smith 

 Ink sketch and colour wash of a scene in Magaliesburg in my Moleskine Nature sketchbook

It's the first of October, heading for mid-summer here in South Africa and we've had no rain yet. Normally we have the winds in August clearing up old growth and our first spring rains early in September, but the wind has been blowing right through September, seemingly blowing the clouds back to whence they came from.

I'm having to water my garden every day, we've had some very high temperatures, but nothing seems to give life like even just a couple of millimetres of rain...

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Two daisies

Bright flowers, whose home is everywhere

Bold in maternal nature’s care

And all the long year through the heir

Of joy and sorrow,

Methinks that there abides in thee

Some concord with humanity,

Given to no other flower I see

The forest through.

- William Wordsworth

Acrylic on primed canvas panel – 9″ × 12″

Some left-over blue paint from my palette when I did the lighthouse. I couldn't just waste the paint so  I was off on a new adventure again with my acrylics! 

Two daisies from my garden (Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa) in a blue bottle on my kitchen table.

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Winter in Summer

“When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.”
— David Hockney

W&N watercolour in my Moleskine 200gsm nature sketchbook

Just as we thought winter had finally ended, we had freezing weather come up from the Cape with temperatures dropping to 12℃. That was on Saturday. Today it's starting to return to normal with beautiful sunshine and no wind. Nature certainly can be unpredictable...

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An African moon

Black ink sketch using Pilot Calligraphy Lettering pen and Artline200 black fine-point pen on DaleRowney 220gsm heavy-duty sketching paper

It was full moon last night and when I switched off the garden lights, my garden was bathed in a golden glow… and I could’ve sworn I saw the fairies hiding under the mushrooms... 

One website explains the full moon thus, “The moon and sun are on a line, with Earth in between. It’s as though Earth is the fulcrum of a see-saw, and the moon and sun are sitting on either end of the see-saw. Thus as the sun sets in the west, the full moon rises. When the sun is below our feet at midnight, the full moon is highest in the sky. When the sun rises again at dawn, the full moon is setting.”

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The first rain

“The rain to the wind said,

'You push and I’ll pelt.'

They so smote the garden bed

That the flowers actually knelt,

And lay lodged—though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.”

― Robert Frost

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm

14th September 2013 

Step outside after the first storm after a dry spell and it invariably hits you: the sweet, fresh, powerfully evocative smell of fresh rain. 

We’ve had our first rain of the season here in Tarlton (Gauteng, South Africa), and the world has suddenly turned from brown and dusty to green and sparkling clean! And nothing on earth smells better than rain on our African soil!

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This Blue Gum

This blue gum tree greets me every morning as I open my studio curtains. She is always there. She has always been there, for the past ten years. She's the one I sit and stare at when I'm pondering or deep in thought. I've watched her swaying in heavy winds, watched as limbs have broken off and watched as veld fires have swept her base.

She stands across the road from our property, probably about 20m tall and offers a safe haven for all the birds in the area. I've watched as baby crows have fledged from her branches and yet, I've never looked at her properly.

Today I decided to look at her, with new eyes, and paint her.

I think she's wonderful. 

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