Starting points

Photos as beginnings, artists abroad

In 2018 I spent a month in South Africa, where my mum comes from. I flew out armed with lots of art supplies and earnest ambitions to wrangle the scenery through my pencils. This is a common plan for me when I go away anywhere. Oh don’t ask me to come out to supper, local friends! I’m far too busy painting! I am a (hopefully much) less horrible Gauguin, utterly absorbed in my art and falling out with everyone about whether to draw from memory or life!! Or, far better, I’m Marianne North, eschewing my second cup of tea, too consumed by desire to capture that flower in oils before it withers on the vine!!!

The artist in holiday mode. She is NOT here to accept your hospitality or share a bottle of wine with you! She came to DRAW THE SCENERY, DAMMIT!!

Instead I made a couple of comics, drew a few plants, and hung out. Here I am getting a crab claw to stay on my nose.

Important work! Someone’s got to do it!

*POINTLESS-ISH ASIDE* : There’s a character in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals I remember - he was an artist who’d suffered a nervous breakdown after the perfect field he’d found to paint had been destroyed overnight by a storm. He’d come to Corfu to recuperate from this terrible blow and begin painting again, but instead just drank wine and lived off the Durrells’ hospitality. I relate, more to the second part, although perhaps I admire having sensibilities so strong that a painting mishap can upset you for years afterwards… (Not really, what an intolerable wimp!)

Though I didn’t get much drawing done in situ, it was still a very creatively inspiring trip. I hadn’t been to Plett (where I was staying) for about fifteen years before then, and the scenery and wildlife were as wonderful as I’d remembered.

I took a ton of photographs. I didn’t do anything with them until a couple of years later, when I started looking back - I think I had some yearning to be there again. I started making some drawings from the photographs, and continued through lockdown in London in 2020 - it was helpful to be able to draw beautiful landscapes while stuck indoors.

One day while I was there, I had lunch next to a tree full of weaver bird nests. The male weaver bird will spend days constructing one of these homes, and if the female doesn’t care for it, he’ll start again and build another - this seemed like good comic fodder.