Drawing games

I taught my niece this game when she was very little. She’s eleven now and she still loves it – she gets everyone drawing, especially when she sleeps over during the holidays. 

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then in half again. The first person to draw draws the head and neck, the second person draws the upper body down to the waist, the third draws the hips and thighs, and the last draws the calves and feet. Each person folds back their drawing so that the next person doesn’t see it and at the end someone – in our family always the youngest! – unfolds the piece of paper to see what kind of crazy creature’s been created.

I love that she can still have so much fun – despite all the TV shows and computer games competing for her attention – with a scrap piece of paper and coloured pencils...

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

Larger than life

Ben Okri won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road in 1991.

Looking back at the shortlist for that year, I was surprised to discover another of my favourite novels of the Nineties on the list of novels that never made it to the shortlist: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

But I loved Ben Okri’s story of Azaro, the “spirit child”. Reviewing the novel in the Sunday Times, Angela Carter said: “Azaro’s scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious...” At around 500 pages, it seems to be a novel readers love or hate – are captivated and can’t put it down or remain unmoved and simply can’t get through it.

The “famished road” of the title is metaphorical and suggests an African nation’s imminent independence and the chaotic and often destructive social, political and technological changes already underway.

It has been diversely characterised as postmodern, post-colonial and magical realist – a label Okri has always rejected. He has said that he draws on realism and philosophy, and traditional African storytelling and beliefs.

These are from a series of illustrations of characters from the novel. I wanted to capture something of their startling and unsettling power, as well as how vividly they came across to me reading the novel.

The first two characters are quite minor. They’re the king’s bodyguards. The king of the spirit world is described as “a great cat with a red beard and eyes of greenish sapphire”. The dashiki  (one of the names for the loose shirt or robe men traditionally wear in West African countries) and kufi (one of the names for the round cap) that the men wear are not very accurate and many of the fabrics are actually far more detailed and beautiful than I’ve imagined. Like many of my sketches at the time, and perhaps suitable to a “fantasy” novel, these weren’t done in a realistic, but in a naive style.

And this is Madame Koto and the boxer who Azaro’s dad takes on. The very heavy and larger than life Madame Koto almost makes the boxer appear skinny. The local bar owner, Madame Koto introduces electricity to the community. She is generous but vain, powerful and increasingly corrupt.

You can read more about Ben Okri's writing at: http://literature.britishcouncil.org and http://www.thenewcanon.com (and on Wikipedia). Or you can pick up the novel...

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..!

A Japanese iris

I painted this, and a few more irises, while out with friends at a small winery in Niigata, Japan – yes, the Japanese make wine too. (And enjoy drinking it, as my friend Ikue would agree.)

We’d spent more time over lunch and lingering at the gift shop than sketching or painting, but it was a good day out. And the resident cat just loved all the attention, coming over to see what we were all painting and sitting in my lap as I sat on the grass with my sketchbook.

Thought I’d read up a bit on irises and discovered that, despite the name originating in Greek mythology (Iris is associated with the rainbow and messenger of the gods) and all the hybridizing and selection, horticulturalists have not been able to breed a pure red (bearded) iris. Most irises are therefore shades of purple and blue or yellow or white.

That little bit of yellow seems to suggest that it’s one of the bearded irises so perhaps not a Japanese iris after all, but an iris in Japan nevertheless.

Ikue painting the garden

Nuria and friend

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.

And nightmares...

These are some details from some of the sketches in my dream diary. All kinds of nightmarish fears are in it – of riots, destruction, powerlessness, hopelessness, homelessness, harm, prejudice, judgement...

But I’ve also included two images of wonder and delight – a shoal of fish swimming near me and a flock of chickens freely wandering through the countryside with me at night.

Doodles

And a few sketches. Most of these were doodled in the margins of my high school maths, biology and Afrikaans notes, and a few I did in primary school.

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.

Dreams

I recently pulled out a pile of old notebooks and photo albums, and amongst them was a dream diary I’d begun when I was eighteen and in first year. I’d wanted something just for me – I didn’t want anyone looking over my shoulder, telling me what to draw and how to draw it. So I used a blue ballpoint pen and kept my sketches quick and rough. The perspectives might be skewed, straight lines are often wobbly, and any mistakes are worked over or shrugged off. 

Stars and snails on the cover.

Peering over the edge of my bed into a pool of water.

Class of 2011

These are some sketches I’ve done for my kind-of-comic – they’re some of the girls from the class of 2011. I taught them for three years when I lived in the Middle East. Full of fun and mischief, they made me laugh – and they made me blush! – and they made me cry – and they made me go a little bananas at times! I watched them grow, and they let me grow as a teacher and make mistakes when I also had a lot to learn. I love them to bits, beautiful girls.

Family sketches

I did these some time ago but since both have birthdays this month I thought I'd put them up here.

My dad reading on holiday - probably the newspaper or one of his magazines.

A quick sketch of my gran, playing cards or Scrabble. She thought I'd made her look too old but this year she'll be 91 and, other than her grey hair, looks just the same!

And an unfinished sketch of my gran...

Picasso's goat

As an art student, I attempted to make some kind of reinterpretation of Picasso’s goat – it was the size of a kid and bright red. It really wasn’t much of a homage.

Years later, I saw the original at the Musee National Picasso in Paris and felt like a little girl in front of his larger than life nanny goat. In cobbling together my kid goat, I’d used a single black and white photocopy of Picasso’s ‘La Chevre’ and was just delighted by all sorts of detail that I’d missed – in the lumpy plaster, the bits of scrap metal, the wicker basket that forms the goat’s rib cage, the ceramic jug udders...

There is something so endearing and humorous – and just so goaty – about it. 

‘La Chevre’, 1950 (cast in bronze in 1952) (http://theotherparis.net)

Picasso and family, including Cabra the goat and Lump the dachshund, at home in Cannes, 1957 (http://www.hrc.utexas.edu)

And here’s another attempt, this time sketched with oil pastels.