"You know, until you artists got here, I never used to see the Sky
John F. Carlson recounts being told by a rural worker in The US. For me, it was as if I had never really seen the beautiful lands of my birthplace in South Africa, until I returned as a painter.
“Curiously enough enough, we think we truly appreciate long before we do. We find later we did not see the things truly, because we had not yet arrived the station that made true appreciation and consequent ‘vision’ possible.”
This is how i felt when seeing Cape Town in my thirties, which is why I have turned to plein air landscape painting as a way of getting to know South Africa better.
"Reality is always a disappointment. Have you ever revisited in mature years the places of your childhood? In your memory, these places and things are wrapped in a kind of golden haze. The very trees are not real trees, but glorified impersonations of trees. A cottage is a mansion, and the meadows are eternally sparkling. Better not revisit them, but let them remain in your memory with that teasing uncertainty." (Carlson, 1958, 120).
Perhaps the magic lies between the haze of memory and the wonder of the present. Just like a good portrait evokes the presence or memory of a person, a successful landscape painting draws upon the sublime and intangible memory of a place, yet anchors it to its time. One artist can never be more contemporary than another.
The difficulty with landscape painting is that it requires a lifetime of study and constant practice to execute well. This exhibition represents the first time I have been able to confidently achieve what I set out to do, and I would not have been able to do this without my training in Florence (thank you Tanvi).
I hope I was able to capture some of the inexplicable wonder of Cape Town, and I hope you will be able to visit the show in person so that I can share it with you.
See details below.
