Winter setting in

“People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.”
- Anton Chekhov

"Winter Setting In" - watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - Maree©
Size - 11" x 8" unframed

Although the lawn in my garden is still thick and green from all the rain we've had, the veld and roadside is starting to show the effects of Winter - all the Cosmos is gone and the tall thatching grass is yellow and dry, just waiting for the first careless cigarette to be flicked out of a car window - this Black Wattle tree still hasn't recovered from the ravages of last year's fires and got a second dose when the property owner did his fire-break this week. Pity, but fire-breaks are a necessary evil if we are going to be protecting our properties from these, sometimes dangerous, fires.

ITEM ID : WinterSettingIn
PRICE - R850.00 including postage in South Africa

Autumn in Tarlton - Commission (SOLD)

“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.”
- Stanley Horowitz

"Autumn in Tarlton"

This painting was a commission from a friend to do another painting of her garden after I did a small sketch of her garden "Autumn setting in" (which you can see in the previous post). It was my first commission for years and I was scared out of my wits that she wouldn't like it, but luckily she was absolutely thrilled!

The original is watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - 30" x 18" - (SOLD)

Buy a Framed Print, Poster or Greeting card - click below :

Framed print for sale on RedBubble

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Autumn setting in (SOLD)

“Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.”

- William Cullen Bryant

Autumn Setting in - this is a small watercolour on 200gsm -

8" x 5.5" - SOLD - Maree©

Autumn is in full swing and the trees in my garden were slowly starting to change colour last month - this is actually a friend's garden on their plot here in Tarlton, South Africa, and I just had to capture her Japanese Maple in all its glorious orange splendour amongst her mostly indigenous trees. She commented that she never knew her garden was so beautiful and that she will be looking at it differently now!

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Daisies for Mother's Day - 9th May 2010

'Tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes!

~William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring," Lyrical Ballads, 1798

I did this sketch of some Asters in my garden last month - these Shasta daisies are real die-hards and sometimes carry on right through winter, but require quite a lot of work dead-heading or else they can really look messy.

I received a wonderful Mother's Day card from my daughter in Ballito (on the North Coast of KwaZulu Natal, S.A.), but no flowers this year! so I picked a bunch of these Shastas for the kitchen table for myself and they looked quite perky in my white enamel jug!

This is watercolour done on Moleskine 200gsm - 8" x 5.5" - NOT FOR SALE

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Daisies from my garden

"Earth laughs in flowers!"

~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"

"Daisies from my garden" - watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - Maree©
Size - 11" x 15" unframed

When it's freezing outside and threatening to rain any minute, and I can't make a field trip to do some sketching, I always turn to my garden for inspiration. Even under the most dismal conditions there is always something to be found - some flower left-over, a few Autumn leaves clinging to a branch or the birds and insects who seem to cheerily carry on, no matter what the weather.

Inspiration taken from my garden - the Shasta daisies are now long overdue on trimming and rather tall and lanky, but they make an ideal study for a quick sketch on a cold and windy day.

ITEM ID : DaisiesGarden

PRICE : R350.00 including postage in South Africa

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African Storm Brewing

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather."

- John Ruskin

"African Storm" - watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - Maree©

Size - 11" x 7.5" unframed

It's already April, way past our rainy season, and on one of our recent trips to Harties (Schoemansville), I captured this Autumn storm brewing over a farm on the banks of the Crocodile River, which flows through Broederstroom on it's way to Hartebeespoort Dam in the North-West Province of South Africa.

When a storm is brewing (in your mind or in your life), embrace it as just another delicious experience, like a summer shower. See what you can learn from it, take a lesson from it, because soon the clouds will have a silver lining again as the sunshine bursts through. Nothing lasts forever - not the rain, not the sunshine, not the storm - so might as well accept it into our lives as just another "bad weather" phenomena.

ITEM ID : AfricanStorm

PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

Black Wattles in Tarlton - SOLD

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Black Wattles in Tarlton" - watercolour on Moleskine 200gsm - Maree©
Size - 12" x 8" unframed - SOLD

The Black Wattle trees on our smallholding in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa, which we are trying our utmost to eradicate, have put up the most spectacular show of browns with their millions of seed-pods in between the greens. How can we even begin to think to destroy such beauty? Yet, for the survival of our own indigenous flora, it is a task we undertake every year in a bid to save some of our own natural growth.

Read more about the Black Wattle struggle HERE.

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Beach Fantasy

I am forever walking upon these shores,

Betwixt the sand and the foam,

The high tide will erase my foot-prints,

And the wind will blow away the foam.

But the sea and the shore will remain

Forever.

- Kahlil Gibran

Beach Fantasy - watercolour on X-pressit 300gsm - Maree©
Size : 12" x 8" unframed

When one is longing for the beach and not able to get there for another few weeks, the next best thing to do is to sketch it! This one is done from memory of the time I spent at St. Lucia, up the North Coast of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

ITEM ID : BeachFantasy

PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

At the edge of the Quarry - SOLD

Life is like a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
- Samuel Butler


"At the edge of the quarry" - watercolour on Moleskine 200gsm - Maree©
Size : 12" x 6" unframed - SOLD


About 2km from us is the Tarlton Brickyard - hectares of ground that have been dug up and soil removed for the making of bricks, leaving the earth pitted with deep holes and piles of heaped ground and smoking kilns where the bricks are being baked.

Some might say it's an eye-sore or a scar on Mother Earth's crust, and I could agree, but besides providing the building industry with the necessary raw materials for our housing needs, this quarry provides endless hours of pleasure to off-road motorbike enthusiasts who race along the holes and over steep mounds of earth, flying through the air like movie stunt men! Horse riders also like to visit, putting their steeds through their paces, using it as a cross-country course. Not all's bad that seems bad!


A brick-making kiln in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

ITEM ID : Quarry1
PRICE - R850.00 including postage

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