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..!

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.