Turtles

I’ve had this t-shirt for about twenty years.

It was screen printed and hand painted by Tori Crampton who made and sold a bunch of t-shirts while she was still at Rhodes. I haven’t heard any news of her in years but hope she’s still doing her thing.

I loved mine and just about wore it day in and day out at the time.

I do get attached to my clothes.

Camera obscura

While in Grahamstown, I took some of my family to the Observatory Museum. Its Victorian camera obscura is the only one of its type in the southern hemisphere and one of only two in the world (the other being in Edinburgh).

A camera obscura is an optical device which predates the camera. The name originates in Latin and refers to a darkened room: camera means “vaulted chamber or room” and obscura means “dark”.

The museum was originally a nineteenth century jeweller’s shop and family home. The original owner and designer of this unusual building, Henry Carter Galpin, was a successful watchmaker and jeweller who constructed the camera obscura in 1882. He was interested in natural history, music, mechanics, astronomy and optics. The museum also includes a Meridian Room where Galpin could ascertain the precise time of local noon (14 minutes behind South African standard time) and a Telescope Room which contains the telescope which was originally installed in the rooftop observatory.

We climbed up a long and very narrow spiral staircase in the highest tower to reach the camera obscura. It works through a system of lenses and a mirror in a revolving turret in its roof and projects a panorama of the city onto a concave viewing surface in the darkened observation room beneath.

It’s fascinating and our guide was knowledgeable and friendly (though the building itself looks in need of maintenance).

This photograph of the image in the camera obscura is not as clear as the image itself. And had it been a sunnier day the image would have been even sharper.

Once locals would set their watches by the time on the clock tower but the clock is no longer working and these days each clock face seems to show a different time..!

You can find out more about the Observatory Museum at http://www.grahamstown.co.za and on Wikipedia.

Back in Bathurst Street

I can’t remember the last time I was in Grahamstown but I went back last week – just for a day – a very cold and windy day..!

But I got a photo of the same view of Bathurst Street that I sketched as an art student years ago.

It was so familiar but of course it’s changed. The building on the corner had been damaged in a fire and had to be restored, and (looking back at my sketch) I noticed the lamp post is gone. And I don’t think that red letterbox was there before – I didn’t include it in my sketch anyway.


But Birch's, the outfitters I'd sat outside sketching, was still there, selling menswear, school uniforms and university robes (for the last 148 years!).

And it was great to see that row of buildings on Bathurst Street still looking clean and bright, and in pretty good condition. And to go back...

Bathurst Street

Birch's

You can see my sketch here: http://daydreamdraggingfeet.blogspot.com/2012/05/down-bathurst-street.html

Down Bathurst Street

Catching up with another old friend last night got me thinking of places I haven’t been back to in years...

I made this sketch at the top of High Street, looking down Bathurst Street. I was sitting outside an awfully old-fashioned outfitters that used to be there – and perhaps still is – when an elderly lady stopped on her way in to scold me, very politely but quite insistently, for sitting out there in the cold. I assured her that although it was chilly I was warm enough and went back to my sketch but a short while later she was back – with an armful of flattened cardboard boxes that she’d requested from the outfitters. I could only smile and obligingly sat down on them to keep from catching my death of a cold.

If my sketch itself looks a little worse for wear it’s because I stopped to lie in the sun on the grass near the Drostdy Arch on my way home, only to have to leap for my drawing board as the sprinklers were turned on..!

Owlish

In many parts of the world, owls have been – and may still be – associated with all kinds of dark and dreadful fears – of death, spirits both protective and sinister, witches and wizards, thunder and lightning, shipwreck and robbery, drunkenness, blindness, idiocy, whooping-cough, hair loss..! There’re just too many to mention.

But owls have also symbolised wisdom and knowledge – which is perhaps why a group of owls is called a parliament (– though I’m not convinced that all parliamentarians are wise and knowledgeable..!).

In South Africa too owls have been feared.

I grew up with an African scops owl in our garden. It used to perch in a big tree outside my brother’s window and we’d sometimes sit and watch it before it got dark. Scops owls are small, agile and solitary, and only have a single type of call – kind of a ‘prrrp’ every five seconds or so. It’s almost monotonous and not at all urgent, but it became such a comforting sound to fall asleep to. You can listen to it here: http://www.owlpages.com/sounds/Otus-senegalensis-1.mp3

Scops owls use their sharp beaks and powerful claws to kill their prey (mainly mice and rats) which they tear and swallow, regurgitating the indigestible parts (like bones and fur) afterwards. We used to find these pellets beneath the tree – they were quite dry and odourless, the tiny bones intact and easily identified.


These owls I sketched were, unfortunately, on display in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. I tried to capture something of their fascination and beauty anyway.

A barn owl

A slightly squint owl

A startled owl?

And for everything about owls: http://www.owlpages.com (And of course Wikipedia!)

At the Odeon

When I was a student there, Grahamstown had two cinemas: His Majesty’s and the Odeon. His Majesty’s was the more comfortable and characterful of the two. It was opened in 1935 but was gutted by a fire in 1998. The Odeon was cavernous and draughty, and the leather seats were cracked and hard. But we went there just as often.

Both cinemas screened a number of films during the annual National Arts Festival. In first year, I went to a whole bunch, from the elegant ‘La Dolce Vita’ to the exuberantly hippy ‘Hair’. These were some of the others I saw that year: ‘Vincent and Theo’, Jane Campion’s ‘Sweetie’, the German comedy ‘The Nasty Girl’, the sharply energetic ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, the beautiful and melodramatic ‘Indochine’, ‘The Exorcist’ uncut and Richard Linklater’s ironic ‘Slacker’ – which I loved.

I can’t say I watched it because, although a friend and I snuck in to watch the contentious ‘The Lover’, we walked out again soon afterwards. We were curious but thought it cold and quite brutal.

This is from a sketch of my friend Qanita and me watching the opening scene of ‘Salmonberries’ at the Odeon, our legs slung over the seats in front of us. I’d already seen ‘Bagdad Cafe’ by the same director which I’d just loved but this was much quieter and slower – though quite haunting. Sitting in the Odeon on a winter’s night, we were shivering at the Alaskan snow.

Sketching taxis

This is another sketch I did just for me. We’d regularly go out and do location drawing around Grahamstown in first year, and I was sitting sketching the taxis. A man carrying a bottle of beer came and sat down beside me. He said he could take me to the township – that I needn’t be scared as a lot of wit vroumense (white women) like me went there. I laughed it off and kept drawing, and he finally lurched off to ask one of my classmates. The township was only on the other side of town, but it could have been another country to me and I only went there once – to an exhibition during the National Arts Festival.

I did that one from memory and these are the charcoal sketches I was doing that day.