The barely mediated contents of my brain

This is what happens when I'm sitting around with drawing materials and no idea of what I'm about to do. It started in the bottom left quadrant with a spontaneous phoenix and paisley explosion. Above the paisley is a city of bird people, the project of much more conscious thought and one of the last things I added.

As you can see, I'm a maximalist.

This painting was made with watercolours and a lot of black ink, and was bought by Lisa, which makes me happy.

!

What's your favourite road sign?

I bet you don't get asked that question very often. I have a very definite favourite, and on my way to Verlorenkloof, I had the pleasure - nay, the privilege - of spotting it in its natural habitat.

Isn't it beautiful? Such purity of emotion. Such endless possibilities.

Usually, this sign is qualified by a sort of subheading affixed to the pole beneath it: !Falling rocks. !Pedestrians. !Potholes. A sighting of it in its pure form gives me intense joy. Look out! Look out for what? I don't know! But look out! With an exclamation mark!

The best thing about my favourite sign is the images it conjures up in one's head. Images like this:

Or this:

Or this:

I say we have a meme. Is anyone with me?

Does anyone know what this character means?

So, at Saturday's market - nearly 300 cranes down, 700 to go! - I got a real, live customer who wants to buy this little still life in oils that I did some years ago. The thing is, she'd really like to know what she's buying, and sadly I have no idea. The candle was a present from my friend Lauren (hi Lauren!) and is labelled "Chinese pyramid small candle" which may help. Or not.

So... does anyone out there know what that character means? Of course I may have copied it wrong, but hopefully not egregiously so. Anonymous (whose mother is the customer, hi Anon and Anon's mom!) thinks it would be really funny if it means "candle".

I like this still life, it's got some of my favourite things in it - a shell bought in Cape Town when I was eight, the candle from Lauren, an amethyst candleholder given to me by my husband (then boyfriend), and jasmine, the very best smell in the world, in a vase belonging to my mom. All arranged on one of my nighties. Oh, the things that inspire us.

The 1000 crane project

I didn't post on the day of the Sendai earthquake because I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say, but I figured out something to do. I'm folding a thousand paper cranes, because of the legend and cultural significance which the Wikipedia page explains better than I can. The way I intend it, it's sort of a prayer, sort of an offering - not at all meant to be magical or to affect events directly. But since one ought to affect events directly as well, I decided to also use it to raise money and moral support for those affected. Here's what happens: I take my cranes to the market that happens on the first and third Saturday of every month outside this gallery, I get people to make a donation and then write their name and a message on one of the squares of paper. It will take me about a month to fold them all, so I'll be there at the next one and possibly also the one after that. I collect all the cash in a shoebox, and I'm going to donate it online to the Japanese Red Cross. Once all the cranes, some with messages folded into them, are finished, I'm going to post them online here and wherever else seems appropriate, and also see if I can hand them over to the local Japanese embassy as a gesture of support.

How you can participate: Obviously, if you live around here, you can turn up at one of the markets in April and sign your bit of paper in person. If, for some reason, :) you can't make it to Pretoria in the next month, you can do the following.

• One, donate any amount of money to any one of the charities doing good work in the area. Do it via someone who's collecting where you live, your local church, online, whatever you like. The Google crisis response page has a number of options. Also, here's a blog post with a number of useful links for figuring out where your money should go.
• Two, once you've done that, post your name (if you want) and message in the comments here, and I'll write it on one of my bits of paper and turn it into one of the 1000 cranes. I don't mind how much or little you donate (on Saturday I got two rand from a little girl who was helping her mother sell brooms at the market. Her name and age are on her crane - Bonthle, 8 yrs). I also don't need any proof that you did donate. Just post your message and it goes on a crane.

Let's go!

At last - a new picture!

I paid a visit to a little print shop, so now I have scans of some things I've been working on since my scanner/printer went bung. Here's one of them: one of my favourite plants in my garden. It's some sort of an iris-type thing. The plant itself is really big, and the flowers last for only one day, but they are the most perfect purplish-blue, and the markings on them are too wonderful.

Now they last for a day, I said, but that's on the plant. This painting was a race against time, as the moment I picked the flower its petals began to shrivel and curl up. The outer petals went first, so I painted them first. Then I did the inner petals (that look like antique blue-and-white Chinese porcelain) and the inside (a garish zebra-print rug) while the whole thing slowly but inexorably rolled itself into a little indigo blob like a sea anemone when the tide goes out.

That was one fast painting. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finished, but one day I want to do a proper painting of the plant that shows how the flowers grow from communal buds that are held on the ends of flattened stems that look just like leaves.

Oh, and does anyone know what it is?

This is sooooo not what it looks like.

We have fleas.

The whole country has fleas, I think. I mean it: if you have a conversation right now, on any topic, with anyone who lives in my general vicinity, and that person has a dog, the conversation will at some point turn to fleas. Because of the hot, muggy, and unusually wet (blame those rain-dances of mine) summer this year, we are having a wave, a veritable Pharaoh-grade plague of fleas. They are on our cats, on us, but mostly on my poor little dog. And they're immune to all the normal remedies, it seems. In any case, none of the tablets, powders and spot-ons I've been encasing her in all summer have prevented her from becoming progressively more moth-eaten-looking from scratching them.

So, in desperation, and convinced that if I were to add one more chemical to the cocktail currently covering Kaori (phew!) she might actually keel over and die, I decided to research an old boereraat (folk remedy). Don't worry, I'm not under the fond delusion that "natural" necessarily means "safe, good and harmless". I did my homework on this remedy, and that's what inspired me to post about it. I was shocked, utterly appalled, at my previous level of ignorance about the marvellous plant known as khakibos (translatable as either khaki weed or frickin'-British-soldiers-weed).

update: a police van just drove past my window. I'm getting nervous.

Things I have always known about khakibos:

*It is named khakibos either because of its colour or because it was
brought over from South America in British soldiers' horse feed during the second Anglo-Boer war.
*It stinks.
*It's a weed.
*Everyone hates it.
*It is reputed to repel fleas.

That was enough for me to determine to rethink my relationship with the stinky stuff, and I turned to Google to help me ensure that it was safe.

Things I know about khakibos since googling it:

*It's actually a type of marigold, Tagetes minuta.

*People voluntarily eat it.

*People voluntarily farm it.

*You can use it to deworm horses.

*You can buy khakibos products online.

*According to the Wikipedia page on the genus Tagetes, khakibos
is the source of an essential oil used in perfume, called tagette, and is also
used as a flavourant in the food and tobacco industries.

By this point my mind was reeling. I was having a khakibos epiphany, and I immediately put on my hiking boots and went out, armed with a large pair of secateurs, to find some. There was none at all in the first place I tried, a plot where a house is currently being built, but after a lot of searching I found two fat, healthy plants in an open veld near my house. It was as I was bearing them home in triumph that I had another epiphany.

Things I know about khakibos since going out to find some:

*It is much less common around here than it used to be.

*It looks a heckuvalot like dagga (marijuana).

So, my triumph rapidly turning into acute fear that someone would call the cops to say they had seen someone carrying large bundles of illegal drugs around the neighbourhood, I slunk back into my house. I chopped it up. It looked even more like dagga. I felt guilty. I put it in a large pot. I thought "pot" and giggled, pathetically, to myself. Then I boiled it up, cooled it down, and rinsed Kaori with it.

It turned her fur a bright greenish-yellow. This is not too obvious on her usually orangey coat, but I'd really, really love to see it on a white dog...

Things I still don't know about khakibos:

*Will it truly defeat The Fleas That Were The Real Reason For Hosni Mubarak's Resignation?

Watch this space.

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.