CHANGING LANDSCAPES JANUARY 2012

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“... there are as many challenging web-sites as there are people,” said the shaman, my cross-roads companion. We were trying to locate a quotation on the web and one of the key words led us to some very scary places. “If words can affect the psyche, then collectives, like the internet and cit-ies, are battle grounds for the souls of their citizens,”she wondered, scrolling down the multitude of voices on the web browser.

“words, words everywhere, and not a co-herent thought in sight...on the radio, in the papers, the certain and the angry cluttering one another’s minds with one another’s pathologies ...” The Viscount Frikkie of Groblershoop.

“Just look at how tough stewing meat and uncooperative root vegetables sort out each other’s politics in a No. 3 potjie,” (tra-ditional three-legged cast iron pot for cook-ing on open fires) says Kohann the Capitalist of Colenso. “After an hour or two, and with almost no outside intervention, deli-cious aromas of fully amalgamated fla-vours fill the air and all within nose-shot, gather eagerly for the feast.”

In this series of musings from the edges of people and places, I try to distill some per-sonal sense of direction from the multitude of voices that come with living in a congested environment.

I am tracking some of the less intrusive voices, like those of architecture, public space, art and the wilderness. These can be beguiling and yet evasive to an overawed ear.

The shaman ordered a three-some of oils from me. These, in spite of what it sounds like, are to be the first three oil paintings that I will attempt. I need a voice to guide me.

Letter from BabelToo many voices?

LETTERS FROM THE EDGE

Tower of Babel iPhone4 wa!papers

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Recent e-mail from the edge of Wall Street, New York:“Yesterday, as I was walking by, I noticed that several young women in the park were danc-ing hypnotically (no doubt intoxicated by the exuberant mood) to the rhythm of African drumming, and then as I looked more closely, I realized that the happy, lovely women were topless.  Interesting protest.”

Stephen Paxton, NYC, on the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zucotti Park 

CHANGING LANDSCAPES JANUARY 2012

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An idea for a painting: We were in Venice re-cently, and photographed a choppy Grand Canal from a traghetto.The boat listed on the wake of a passing water bus and the horizon tilted as the camera shutter clicked. The build-ings are dark. Light reflected in two of the west-facing windows of a palazzo. In the photo, the turgid canal swells between the sombre walls of the buildings.

How to portray this using oils. How to “hear” the water, which is both ominous and lumi-nous?

We decide to visit a local gallery for inspiration.

We park in the deep shade of the plane & oak trees, that roof Ryneveld Street, and step out into the mouth of a strong south-easter, its hot breath laced with the searing sizzle of cica-das.

The Sasol Art Gallery is a High Victorian building. In this part of town the buildings stand apart, pavilion buildings on large proper-ties.

Stellenbosch is known for its historic Dorp Street, where the buildings are well mannered and, shoulder to shoulder, they abide by what Christopher Alexander (a mathematician turned architectural critic and author) termed: “the principle of the second man”.

This dictum binds any new building to a con-spiracy of form, shape, and proportion with its pre-existing neighbors. In essence: everyone is second to something or someone else. This makes for harmonious, if occasionally unad-venturous, urban spaces.

Ryneveld Street is a rebel. The students’ resi-dence known as Wilgenhof, turns on its own axis, as if flaunting the fact that it dances to the tune of a different harmonica.

This urban contrariness is then repeated not once, but twice on the same block. The Stu-dente Kerk is turned 45 degrees to the street and the ancient hall of the synagogue further down also tilts its gable rakishly at passers-by.

Known as the Skewed House (“Skuinshuis”, in Afrikaans) it has become the site of creative and alternative businesses.

The steps rise from Ryneveld Street to the front door of the

Sasol Gallery. Jacques Dhont’s “Guardian An-gel” spreads its holey wings in welcome be-tween the door and the street.

But we have come to look at oils. So we do not linger with the angel be-fore climbing into the cool interior of the gallery.

There are many voices in here: a

busty Mother Africa unfurls from a tree stump, intriguing abstract lithographs and a large head by Auguste Rodin. Not what we are looking for today.

Then I see her. Yellow shirt, light with high floppy collar, framing a slightly flushed face. A grey arch rises behind the young woman with the bowed lips. Her hair firmly tied back, like one who wishes to get on with the job.

A small oil painting, perhaps the size of the page from a handwritten letter. An ordinary face, but for the eyes, which make contact with mine over the decades that separate painter and viewer.

Grand Canal Oil no. 2 by the author, December 2011

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The self confidence of the brush strokes, the vibrancy of a life, long since lived, yet shining from a piece of canvas, in a gallery, in a small town at the bottom end of Africa. I marvel at the glory of discovering this one voice on this one day, and know it will be the first of many. (Self portrait by Katrine Harries, 1933).

Greetings from the edge,

ANDREW HORNE Stellenbosch, Jan 2012

PS. In Babel, perhaps the number of voices is not the problem, but what one brings to the hearing.

An unexamined life: “ ... a string of misinterpreted sig-nals and an ingrained miscellany of indiscriminate hab-its,...” Orhan Pamuk, The New Life.

Sasol Gallery, Ryneveld Street, Ste!enbosch. Jacques Dhont’s Gaurdian Angel.

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