This watercolour was posted in April 2009.  Although I was not yet painting a watercolour a day I used to take a watercolour kit with me wherever I went.   At the time I was chatting with a small group of people I had met in the blogosphere (this was before we had all got lazy and migrated to Zuckerberg’s platforms).  One of my blog friends from Vancouver said she really liked the painting.  We agreed a swop and I sent her this painting and she sent me one of her works which I had said I liked.  I thought that was quite cool.

Yesterday as I walked in to town I reflected on how few of my works over the last few years I have sold.  And I realised I am happy with this.  Some of the watercolours, painted over a period of time tell a story.  Like my suite of Tools and Technology watercolours,  our local peak  Helderberg  and my private slice of recovery on the road to Ladybrand.   Maybe I will create a calendar with a month on each of these some time – OR –  a diary – how cool would that be?

Anyway – here is the post from back then:

This weekend I went hiking with family and friends in the Hottentots Holland mountains above our town.  It was a great to be out even though I was feeling a little under the weather and not at all fit.  Towards the end of the walk in I told the others to go on and I sat and did this sketch.  Our whole area has been ravaged by veld-fires this summer, many of them believed to be as a result of arson.  There have been some days when our whole valley has been filled with smoke.  So the landscape was all blacks and browns – with a tint of green as new shoots begin to appear.  I thought of Carol’s story about needing a pallette of 64 shades of ash for the post-apocalyptic artist.

ldk-d

The mountain hut was under Landroskop.  A ‘Landros’ is a Magistrate and ‘kop’ is ‘head’ or ‘peak.  (is dit reg Cecily?)  ‘That evening after sitting around a fire in the mountain hut I slept under the stars.  We had a few drops of rain and I moved to a spot where I was sheltered but was eaten alive by mosquitoes so I went out again.  At first I could not sleep and I lay looking up at the heavens.  Then I realised I had been asleep and the Southern Cross rotated in the sky.  And the next I looked the stars were fading and there was light in  the eastern sky.