An expedition

So, for the past week I've been at the most wonderful place called Verlorenkloof. It's an annual thing where a few BAASA members from the Pretoria region get together and rent one of the crofts. I'm not really sure why they call them crofts. I think maybe it's because the people who go there tend to be into either hill walking or trout fishing, and that people who go to Scotland to stay in crofts tend to be into the same things...

Anyway, we go there to paint the plants, and there are always gorgeous things to be found. Look at these photos of the beautiful riverine forest:

The last one is the most beautiful little orchid, Stenoglottis fimbriata, that I'm working on right now. You need to rotate it to the right to see how it actually grows, but I liked the composition of the photo this way.

Out of the attic: An oil painting of flowers

You know it's a really old picture when it's signed with my maiden name. This painting isn't supposed to be botanical art; the details are by no means accurate and the sizes of the flowers aren't even to scale with each other. The red one is Erythrina zeyheri, the ploughbreaker, and the yellow one is some kind of Hypoxis. Also, I was really, really young when I painted this.

Out of the attic: Disa hybrid

These lovely little orchids are so difficult to keep alive, as they need to be kept constantly watered, yet are horribly susceptible to damping off. There are a number of people who have succeeded. I am not one of them.

Out of the attic: Leafy seadragon

My scanner hates me and is in open rebellion. Until I figure out what to do about it, I'm going to post some pictures from the dim and murky past. This one isn't actually all that old - it's the one I used for the blog wallpaper.

Leafy seadragons are one of my favourite things in the whole world. They are just so utterly improbable. This picture was done on the back of an old calendar, using technical pens and watercolours.

"It will be fun when we at last meet"

A wood elf

Another tiny picture - this time using pencil with watercolour. My mission to learn to draw people properly is going to start with a whole lot of not-quite human people. For one thing, I adore fantasy and science fiction, and for another, it provides a marvellous excuse for any anatomical errors. People's waists aren't that tiny! Why is her arm, like, the widest part of her? And her eyes are totally wrong! Aha, but she's an elf - she's meant to look like that! Well, that's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Prickly pears

Lately I've been working on a number of really tiny pictures. I feel freer to experiment that way, because it silences that little voice in my head that starts freaking out any time I waste good paper on messing about. This isn't good paper, just scraps, so I can use it for any strange idea that comes my way. At the moment I'm experimenting with mixed media - ink and watercolour, pencil and watercolour, ink and whatever else I can get to stick to the paper. Outlines everywhere; I'm trying to find almost a comic-book style of doing things. First this one. It's safe, it's a plant.



I used watercolours, insoluble ink and salt on Schoeller's Hammer paper (which is the smoothest anti-bleed surface out there, but which is sadly being discontinued). The size is pretty much what you see on the screen. The wonderfully vulgar yellowish colour of some of the leaves is Green Gold, the last colour I bought and my latest obsession.

Sun halo!

So I wanted rain - and I got it, and more! Yesterday evening there was a semi-decent storm that had me running around outside trying to take pictures of lightning. That didn't work but I got this double rainbow. No, I'm not going to say it!

Then, this morning...

A friend of my husband's called him to tell him to look outside. The radio station that my mother was listening to was getting calls from all sorts of mad people saying that the world was ending and the aliens were coming. It was even on the national TV news this evening. It was a sun halo, and I've never seen one before in my life. Neither, it seems, had anyone else around here. We don't usually get the very high cirrus clouds filled with ice crystals that are needed for this to happen. In this case, it was caused by a storm system over Botswana. Has anyone else out there seen one?

I was trying to protect the camera as if it were my eyes. Only later did I think that I should have just snapped away madly without looking. Hooray for strange weather!

Waiting for the rain

It's not really spring any more - but to me it's not quite summer until it rains. And not the miserable attempts at rain we've been having on and off for the last few weeks: a few grumbles of thunder, a few drops, and nothing more. I want proper rain. To demonstrate what I mean by proper rain - and by way of encouragement, since my rain dances haven't been working - I thought I'd post some photos from a couple of years ago, in our old house, when our garden flooded.



You know it's real rain when you're worried about your fish escaping.



I simply had to make paper boats.



My lovely Katala, who is fascinated by water of all kinds.

So here's to rain, the kind with more than 27 drops. It had better come soon, because I'm feeling dry, dusty and irritable.

Cymbidium hybrid

This orchid gave me an inordinate amount of trouble to paint. The pencil drawing was easy. I ignored everything you're supposed to do and put the focal point directly, exactly in the middle of the picture, and cackled with glee. I was very happy with the drawing. Then I went away for a week on an archaeological dig (pictures forthcoming one day when the findings are published), and when I came back I had to start painting.



First I stared at it for a couple of days, afraid to mess up my beautiful pencil drawing. Then my cat saved me by planting a couple of muddy paw prints on it. It couldn't possibly get worse, so I got going. I painted and painted, but I never reached that meditative zone you find yourself in when things are going well. By the time I was about halfway through, all the flowers got pollinated and promptly died, the culprit being a slug that had stowed away on the plant when it was brought indoors. So I worked partly from bad printouts of bad photos I'd taken of the flowers before going away, and mostly from memory.



I consoled myself with something C. S. Lewis wrote (just don't ask me where; I think he was talking about certain kinds of Biblical textual criticism) that one can labour over a piece of writing, and the end result can appear spontaneous (or vice versa). I told myself that being in a bad state of mind while painting doesn't necessarily mean that the painting will be bad.

I'm not sure about that any more, though. Eventually I finished the picture and thought it wasn't so bad. Then I took it in to the exhibition I painted it for, and it just didn't measure up to the other entries, even to my own second entry that I hadn't sweated over nearly as much. So maybe feeling good while painting does matter after all. Next time I don't feel like working on a painting, I'll use this experience as an excuse to procrastinate... just a little.



I like the last view - leaves with dead and/or eaten bits are so much more fun than perfect ones.